A Quantum-based Database Query Scheme for Privacy Preservation in Cloud Environment

Cloud computing is a powerful and popular information technology paradigm that enables data service outsourcing and provides higher-level services with minimal management effort. However, it is still a key challenge to protect data privacy when a user accesses the sensitive cloud data. Privacy-preserving database query allows the user to retrieve a data item from the cloud database without revealing the information of the queried data item, meanwhile limiting user's ability to access other ones. In this study, in order to achieve the privacy preservation and reduce the communication complexity, a quantum-based database query scheme for privacy preservation in cloud environment is developed. Specifically, all the data items of the database are firstly encrypted by different keys for protecting server's privacy, and in order to guarantee the clients' privacy, the server is required to transmit all these encrypted data items to the client with the oblivious transfer strategy. Besides, two oracle operations, a modified Grover iteration, and a special offset encryption mechanism are combined together to ensure that the client can correctly query the desirable data item. Finally, performance evaluation is conducted to validate the correctness, privacy, and efficiency of our proposed scheme.