Cloud computing has undoubtedly become the key enabler for processing and analyzing massive amounts of information. However, even more and more personal data reside in the cloud nowadays and clients are worried about their privacy. One way to ensure data confidentiality is to use simple, over-the-self encryption (e.g., AES). Unfortunately, such a technique does not allow the server storing the ciphertexts to perform any meaningful computation (e.g., keyword search) on them. This limits the applicability of cloud computing significantly.

I will present recent work (CCS 2012 and NDSS 2014) on the theory and practice of Searchable Encryption (SE), a set of techniques that we have developed to address the above problem. The talk is going to focus on encrypted single-keyword search for static and dynamic data. Towards the end I will talk about open theoretical problems in the field, various exciting SE systems that we are developing at Maryland, as well as other research on cloud security that I plan to work on in the next five years.