A Framework for Homomorphic, Private Information Retrieval Protocols in the Cloud

Professional use of cloud health storage around the world implies Information-Retrieval extensions. These developments should help users find what they need among thousands or billions of enterprise documents and reports. However, extensions must offer protection against existing threats, for instance, hackers, server administrators and service providers who use people's personal data for their own purposes. Indeed, cloud servers maintain traces of user activities and queries, which compromise user security against network hackers. Even cloud servers can use those traces to adapt or personalize their platforms without users' agreements. For this purpose, we suggest implementing Private Information Retrieval (PIR) protocols to ease the retrieval task and secure it from both servers and hackers. We study the effectiveness of this solution through an evaluation of information retrieval time, recall and precision. The experimental results show that our framework ensures a reasonable and acceptable level of confidentiality for retrieval of data through cloud services.