Implementation and evaluation of improved secure index scheme using standard and counting bloom filters

Abstract

This paper presents an improved Secure Index scheme as a searchable symmetric encryption technique and provides a solution that enables a secure and efficient data storage and retrieval system. Secure Index scheme, conceived by Goh, is based on standard Bloom filters (SBFs). Knowledge of the limitations of SBFs, such as handling insertions but not deletions, helps in understanding the advantages of counting Bloom filters (CBFs). Thus, we have extended this scheme by adding a new algorithm so that CBFs can also be applicable. Unlike the old scheme, our scheme can handle dynamic update of a document by updating the existing index without rebuilding it. Moreover, we give a complementary comparison of both filters in our scheme. Finally, a detailed performance evaluation shows that our scheme exhibits similar performance with regard to the query overhead and the false positive probability and is quite efficient than the old scheme with regard to the update overhead by allocating more space.