Graph Encryption for Top-K Nearest Keyword Search Queries on Cloud

Driven by the growing security demands of data outsourcing applications in sustainable smart cities, encrypting clients' data has been widely accepted by academia and industry. Data encryptions should be done at the client side before outsourcing, because clouds and edges are not trusted. Therefore, how to properly encrypt data in a way that the encrypted and remotely stored data can still be queried has become a challenging issue. Though keyword searches over encrypted textual data have been extensively studied, approaches for encrypting graph-structured data with support for answering graph queries are still lacking in the literature. In this paper, we specially investigate graph encryption method for an important graph query type, called top-k Nearest Keyword (kNK) searches. We design several indexes to store necessary information for answering queries and guarantee that private information about the graph such as vertex identifiers, keywords and edges are encrypted or excluded. Security and efficiency of our graph encryption scheme are demonstrated by theoretical proofs and experiments on real-world datasets, respectively.