Abstract
This paper proposed a multi-keyword ciphertext search, based on an improved-quality hierarchical clustering (MCS-IQHC) method. MCS-IQHC is a novel technique, which is tailored to work with encrypted data. It has improved search accuracy and can self-adapt when performing multi-keyword ciphertext searches on privacy-protected sensor network cloud platforms. Document vectors are first generated by combining the term frequency-inverse document frequency (TF-IDF) weight factor and the vector space model (VSM). The improved quality hierarchical clustering (IQHC) algorithm then generates document vectors, document indices, and cluster indices, which are encrypted via the k-nearest neighbor algorithm (KNN). MCS-IQHC then returns the top-k search result. A series of experiments proved that the proposed method had better searching efficiency and accuracy in high-privacy sensor cloud network environments, compared to other state-of-the-art methods.