Application of Meta-Heuristics Methods on PIR Protocols Over Cloud Storage Services

Abstract

The term of big, data is an important concept that represents the exponential growth of volume and variety of data collection, one of the advantages of this technology is the ability of treating heterogeneous data, such as textual documents, also as its name indicates ‘big data' refers to the huge volume of data counted by petabytes which implies an information retrieval extension to help users to find their need this extension must incorporate other protection against existent threats. In fact, big data services such as cloud computing do keep traces about user activities and queries, which compromise the user privacy and can offer useful information to network hackers that attack users or even cloud server to adapt or personalize their platforms without the user's agreement, and maybe the most known attack can be man-in-the-middle during a storage or extracting data session between a user and a cloud server for this cause, the need to a secure protocol represent a high necessity which gives birth to the concept of Private Information Retrieval (PIR), as the authors mention before, one of the checks is the vast mass of data that hinders the correct handling of data and increases the error rate for retrieving a relevant information, for that the use of new techniques and approaches that allow the improvement of retrieval models over this kind of services is an important case to be processed. In this purpose, the authors introduce a new proposition called Meta-heuristic Privet Information Retrieval (M-PIR) in order to benefit from the success of meta-heuristics methods and improve the efficiency of PIR protocols in term of returned information; to better meet the needs of users, they use a bag of word for the text representation, TFIDF as weighting for the digitalization, the benchmarking MEDLINE corpus for the experimentation and panoply of validation tools (Recall, Precision, F-measure and Entropy) for the evaluation of our results. So that the paper is over the application of a meta-heuristics algorithms on a set of PIR protocols using a multitude of cryptographic schemes in order to study the influence of these schemes on quality of results.