Currently, searchable encryption has attracted considerable attention in the field of cloud computing. The existing research mainly focuses on keyword-based search schemes, most of which support the exact matching of keywords. However, keyword-based search schemes ignore spelling errors and semantic expansions of keywords. The significant drawback makes the existing techniques unsuitable in cloud computing as it greatly affects system usability and can not completely satisfy the users' search

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... tentions. In this paper, we propose an effective fuzzy semantic searchable encryption scheme (FSSE) that supports multi-keyword search over encrypted data in cloud computing. In our scheme, we exploit a keyword fingerprint generation algorithm to generate a fingerprint set of the keyword dictionary and a fingerprint of the query keywords, and employ Hamming distance to quantify keywords similarity. Based on the proposed fingerprint generation algorithm and Hamming distance, we realize fuzzy search. Furthermore, we utilize the semantic expansion technique to expand query keywords and calculate the semantic similarity between the query keywords and the expanded word of the query keywords to achieve the semantic search. To improve the search efficiency, we construct an inverted index structure and use the vector intersection matching as well as short-circuit matching operations to effectively filter irrelevant documents. The theoretical analysis and experimental results demonstrate that our proposed scheme satisfies the security guarantee of searchable encryption, enhances system usability, and is more efficient in comparison with the state of the art schemes. INDEX TERMS Searchable encryption, cloud computing, fuzzy semantic search, multi-keyword search.