Searchable Encryption (SE) schemes are a promising solution to the problem of outsourcing one’s data to a cloud provider in a secure way, while still retaining the ability to search for and easily retrieve specific documents. A multitude of different schemes have been proposed and designed, yet in general they still lack usability/applicability for a specific use case or proper security analysis in order to be widely implemented and used. To address this issue we started a project to determine which SE schemes fit certain use cases - mainly focusing on usability. We examined nearly 400 papers on SE schemes from the last 13 years and extracted categorization domains for SE schemes. Furthermore we took a time-based look at these domains and tried to identify future trends in SE technologies. In this position paper we introduce our methodology and give a short overview of our current work-in-progress.

With the rise of cloud computing new ways to secure outsourced data have to be devised. Traditional approaches like simply encrypting all data before it is transferred only partially alleviate this problem. Searchable Encryption (SE) schemes enable the cloud provider to search for user supplied strings in the encrypted documents, while neither learning anything about the content of the documents nor about the search terms. Currently there are many different SE schemes defined in the literature, with their number steadily growing. But experimental results of real world performance, or direct comparisons between different schemes, are severely lacking. In this work we propose a simple Java client-server framework to efficiently implement different SE algorithms and compare their efficiency in practice. In addition, we demonstrate the possibilities of such a framework by implementing two different existing SE schemes from slightly different domains and compare their behavior in a real-world setting.