Performance analysis of searchable symmetric encryption schemes on mobile devices

Abstract

In the age of cloud computing, it is common for individuals to store their digital documents to the cloud so that they can access them anytime and anywhere. While the demand of cloud storage continues to grow, the associated security threat has caught attention of the public. Searchable encryption (SE) attempts to ensure confidentiality of data in public storage while offering searching capability to the end users. Previous studies on SE focused on the security and performance on desktop applications and there were no discussions of those on mobile devices, where their memory, computational and network capabilities are limited. In this paper, we implemented three recent SE schemes and evaluated their performance in Android mobile devices in terms of indexing time and searching time, under (1) exact-match, (2) partial search, and (3) multi-keyword queries. We realize that each of the schemes has its performance advantages and disadvantages. Since user experience is one of the major concerns in mobile App, our findings would help App developers to choose the appropriate SE schemes in their applications.