Answering queries using pairings

Outsourcing data in the cloud has become nowadays very common. Since – generally speaking – cloud data storage and management providers cannot be fully trusted, mechanisms providing the confidentiality of the stored data are necessary. A possible solution is to encrypt all the data, but – of course – this poses serious problems about the effective usefulness of the stored data. In this work, we propose to apply a well-known attribute-based cryptographic scheme to cope with the problem of querying encrypted data. We have implemented the proposed scheme with a real-world, off-the-shelf RDBMS and we provide several experimental results showing the feasibility of our approach.