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@article{191804,
        author = {Prajakta Chandrashekhar Pedgaonkar and Dr. Ganesh Wayal},
        title = {Survey on Secure Search in the Cloud Protecting Encrypted Data},
        journal = {International Journal of Innovative Research in Technology},
        year = {2026},
        volume = {12},
        number = {8},
        pages = {8968-8977},
        issn = {2349-6002},
        url = {https://ijirt.org/article?manuscript=191804},
        abstract = {The growing reliance on cloud infrastructures for storing and managing sensitive data has intensified the need for secure and usable mechanisms that enable search over encrypted content. While encryption effectively protects data confidentiality, it significantly restricts data usability, particularly in keyword-based retrieval. Recent research efforts have explored searchable encryption, secret-sharing-based search, blockchain-enabled access control, and post-quantum cryptography; however, these techniques are often developed in isolation and fail to address practical deployment challenges holistically. Key limitations persist in the form of search and access pattern leakage, trusted setup assumptions, limited auditability, and a lack of cryptographic agility against emerging quantum threats. This paper presents a structured review of secure cloud data access mechanisms proposed between 2020 and 2025, critically analyzing their strengths, limitations, and underlying assumptions. Building on the identified research gaps, the paper introduces a unified architectural perspective for privacy-preserving and auditable keyword search over encrypted cloud data. The proposed framework integrates secret-sharing-based searchable encryption with dealer-free randomness generation to distribute trust and mitigate collusion risks. To ensure long-term security, post-quantum key encapsulation and digital signatures are incorporated into the key management lifecycle, while a permissioned blockchain is employed exclusively for access control enforcement and immutable audit logging. By decoupling encrypted storage, searchable indexing, key management, and governance, the architecture achieves a balance between efficiency, transparency, and security. The paper concludes by outlining open challenges and future research directions toward scalable, verifiable, and quantum-resilient encrypted search systems, positioning the proposed framework as a practical foundation for next-generation secure cloud data services.},
        keywords = {privacy-preserving encrypted search, secret sharing searchable encryption, auditable cloud data access, post-quantum cryptography, blockchain-based access control, secure cloud storage, keyword search over encrypted data, distributed trust architectures, quantum-resilient security, verifiable data governance},
        month = {February},
        }