Weighted Ranked Queries for secure search in cost-effective clouds

Cloud computing has emerged as a major way of reducing the information technology costs incurred by organizations. For a cost-sensitive organization which stores its data in the cloud and retrieves files via keyword search, the primary focus is on the issues of cost effectiveness as well as privacy. Three keyword-based secure search protocols, namely Ostrovsky protocol, Cooperative Private Searching (COPS) protocol and Efficient Information Retrieval for Ranked Queries (EIRQ) protocol are reviewed in this paper. Each protocol offers an improvement over the basic keyword search used by today's cloud users. After discussing the limitations of EIRQ, a new protocol named Weighted Ranked Queries (WRQ) is proposed. A comparison of the performance of these protocols is presented. The future work that could be carried out in this area is mentioned in the conclusion.