Security Analysis of Collusion-Resistant Nearest Neighbor Query Scheme on Encrypted Cloud Data

Recently, Yuan et al. (IEEE Infocom ’13, pp.2652–2660) proposed an efficient secure nearest neighbor (SNN) search scheme on encrypted cloud database. Their scheme is claimed to be secure against the collusion attack of query clients and cloud server, because the colluding attackers cannot infer the encryption/decryption key. In this letter, we observe that the encrypted dataset in Yuan’s scheme can be broken by the collusion attack without deducing the key, and present a simple but powerful attack to their scheme. Experiment results validate the high efficiency of our attacking approach. Additionally, we also indicate an upper bound of collusion-resistant ability of any accurate SNN query scheme. key words: cloud computing, encrypted query, nearest neighbor, attack