A ROBUST SYMMETRIC-KEY BASED VERIFICATION PROTOCOL FOR DYNAMIC CLOUD DATA SEARCH

Abstract

Cloud computing has become the backbone of modern data storage and processing, offering scalability and cost-effectiveness. However, outsourcing sensitive information to untrusted cloud servers raises significant challenges regarding data confidentiality, integrity, and secure retrieval. Searchable encryption has emerged as a practical solution, allowing users to perform keyword-based searches on encrypted data. Yet, most existing schemes either rely on costly public-key cryptography or fail to provide verifiable search results, particularly in dynamic cloud environments where data updates frequently occur. This paper proposes a robust symmetric-key based verification protocol for keyword search over dynamic encrypted cloud data. The proposed approach employs lightweight symmetric-key primitives, combined with verification metadata, to ensure correctness and completeness of search results while maintaining low computational overhead. Experimental analysis demonstrates that the proposed protocol achieves improved efficiency, scalability, and security compared to traditional methods, making it suitable for real-world cloud storage applications