ABSTRACT
Encryption is a method that secures information by making it illegible or indistinguishable from random noise to anyone who does not have some privileged information, a key. The practice of using cryptography to encrypt sensitive information has been around for millennia. For thousands of years, a major tenet was that the encrypted information was unusable until decrypted. This served well until recently, when the vast number of documents needing to be encrypted has made decrypting individual documents to find query results infeasible in practice. Searchable encryption was invented to solve the problem of how to find keywords in documents that are encrypted without decrypting the entire corpus set.
