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In this paper, the authors propose an effective mechanism for the protection of digital library readers' lending privacy under a cloud environment.

The basic idea of the method is that for each literature circulation record, before being submitted to the untrusted cloud database of a digital library for storage, its reader number has to be encrypted strictly at a client, so as to make it unable for an attacker at the cloud to know the specific reader associated with each circulation record and thus protect readers' lending privacy. Moreover, the authors design an effective method for querying the encrypted literature circulation records, so as to ensure the accuracy and efficiency of each kind of database queries related to the encrypted reader number field of literature circulation records.

Finally, both theoretical analysis and experimental evaluation demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods.

This paper presents the first study attempt to the privacy protection of readers' literature circulations, which can improve the security of readers' lending privacy in the untrusted cloud, without compromising the accuracy and efficiency of each kind of database queries in the digital library. It is of positive significance to construct a privacy-preserving digital library platform.

First, the authors analyze the key problems faced by the protection of digital library readers' data privacy and behavior privacy. Second, the authors introduce the characteristics of all kinds of existing approaches to privacy protection and their application limitations in the protection of readers' data privacy and behavior privacy. Lastly, the authors compare the advantages and disadvantages of each kind of existing approaches in terms of security, efficiency, accuracy and practicality and analyze the challenges faced by the protection of digital library reader privacy.

In this paper, the authors review a number of research achievements relevant to privacy protection and analyze and evaluate the application limitations of them in the reader privacy protection of a digital library, consequently, establishing the constraints that an ideal approach to library reader privacy protection should meet, so as to provide references for the follow-up research of the problem.

As a result, the authors conclude that an ideal approach to reader privacy protection should be able to comprehensively improve the security of all kinds of readers' privacy information on the untrusted server-side as a whole, under the premise of not changing the architecture, efficiency, accuracy and practicality of a digital library system.

Along with the rapid development of new network technologies, such as cloud computing, the server-side of a digital library is becoming more and more untrustworthy, thereby, posing a serious threat to the privacy of library readers. In fact, the problem of reader privacy has become one of the important obstacles to the further development and application of digital libraries.