Entity-Aware and Secure Query Optimization in Database Using Named Entity Recognition

Abstract: Cloud storage has become the backbone of modern data infrastructure, yet privacy and efficient data retrieval remain significant challenges. Traditional privacy-preserving approaches primarily focus on enhancing database security but fail to address the automatic identification of sensitive information before encryption. This can dramatically reduce query processing time and mitigate errors during manual identification of sensitive information, thereby reducing potential privacy risks. To address this limitation, this research proposes an intelligent privacy-preserving query optimization framework that integrates Named Entity Recognition (NER) to detect sensitive information in queries, utilizing secure data encryption and query optimization techniques for both sensitive and non-sensitive data in parallel, thereby enabling efficient database optimization. Combined deep learning algorithms and transformer-based models to detect and classify sensitive entities with high precision, and the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) algorithm to encrypt, with blind indexing to secure search functionality of the sensitive data, whereas non-sensitive data was divided into groups using the K-means algorithm, along with a rank search for optimization. Among all NER models, the Deep Belief Network combined with Long Short-Term Memory (DBN-LSTM) delivers the best performance, with an accuracy of 93% and precision (94%), recall, and F1 score of 93%, and 93%, respectively. Besides, encrypted search achieved considerably faster results with the help of blind indexing, and non-sensitive data fetching also outperformed traditional clustering-based searches. By integrating sensitive data detection, encryption, and query optimization, this work advances the state of privacy-preserving computation in modern cloud infrastructures.