lucene indexing security files

Question

I'll try to briefly describe my problem and task. My task is to create search engine for different types of file (only text file types) pdf, word, odf, xml but not html. I have got little experience with lucene about year ago i wrote simple full text search using lucene and hibernate search. That was simple project. But now i have got very difficult task with searching. We are using java 1.7 and glassfish 3 and i have to concentrate only server side approach not client ui. Ther is my three major problem :

1) All files is stored on webdav server, but information about file name , id file typ etc are stored into database (postgresql) so when i creating index i need to use both information. As a result of query i need only return file id from database. Summary content of file is stored in server but information about file is stored in database so we must retrieve both.

2) Secondary problem it that each file has a level of secrecy. But major problem is that this level is calculated dynamically. When calculating level of security for file we considering several properties. The static properties is files location, the folder in which the file is, but also dynamic information user profiles user roles and departments . So when user "Maggie" is logged she can search only files "test.pdf" , "test2.doc" etc but if user "Stev" is logged he have got different profiles such a Maggie so he can only search some phase in file "broken.pdf", "mybook.odt". test2.doc etc ..... . I think that when for example user search phase "lucene +solr" we search in all indexed documents and after that filtered result. But i think that solution is is not very efficient. What if results count 100 files , so what next we filtered step by step each files ? But i do not see any other solution. Maybe you can help me and lucene or solr have got mechanism to help.

3) Last problem is that some files are encrypted. So that files must be indexed only once before encryption ! But i think that if we indexed secure files so we get security issue. Because all word from that file is tokenized. I have not got any idea haw to secure lucene documents and index datastore ? its possible ...

Also i have got question that i need to use Solr for my serarch engine or using only lucene and write own search engine ? So as you can see i have not got problem with indexing , serching but with security files and files secured levels.

Thanks for any hints and time you spend for me.

Answer 1

For Indexing both the File and Metadata of the file from DB check ExtractRequestHandler
You can pass the metadata attributes and the file to be indexed as a single request and it would be stored as a single document in lucene index.

For Security, One of the options is to store the Users/Roles who have access to the Files/Documents within the Solr index.
So you can always filter the results with the user/role to retrieve only the those results.
Make you Solr url secured so that Users don't have a direct access to the documents.
Also check for SOLR-1872

For encryption, Solr and underlying Parser Tika does provide handling for the Encrypted files by providing additional parameters.

Apache Solr uses the Apache Tika which uses the Bouncy Castle generic encryption libraries for extracting text content and metadata from encrypted PDF files. See http://www.bouncycastle.org/ for more details on Bouncy Castle.