SCALE: An Efficient Framework for Secure Dynamic Skyline Query Processing in the Cloud

It is now cost-effective to outsource large dataset and perform query over the cloud. However, in this scenario, there exist serious security and privacy issues that sensitive information contained in the dataset can be leaked. The most effective way to address that is to encrypt the data before outsourcing. Nevertheless, it remains a grand challenge to process queries in ciphertext efficiently. In this work, we shall focus on solving one representative query task, namely dynamic skyline query, in a secure manner over the cloud. However, it is difficult to be performed on encrypted data as its dynamic domination criteria require both subtraction and comparison, which cannot be directly supported by a single encryption scheme efficiently. To this end, we present a novel framework called scale. It works by transforming traditional dynamic skyline domination into pure comparisons. The whole process can be completed in single-round interaction between user and the cloud. We theoretically prove that the outsourced database, query requests, and returned results are all kept secret under our model. Empirical study over a series of datasets demonstrates that our framework improves the efficiency of query processing by nearly three orders of magnitude compared to the state-of-the-art.