Public Key Based Searchable Encryption with Fine-Grained Sender Permission Control

Public key encryption with keyword searched (PEKS) is a promising cryptographic primitive that realizes keyword search in the ciphertext. Since it can provide flexible access to encrypted data, PEKS has been widely used in various fields, such as Cloud Computing and Internet of Things. Until now, many PEKS schemes with fine-grained access control have been proposed to satisfy the requirements of data sharing. However, most previous work only considered the control of data receiver and ignored the control of data sender. In practice, the malicious data sender might correctly generate ciphertexts containing useless information, which in turn increases the computational burden and communication load for the data receiver. To address the above problem, we introduce the concept of PEKS with fine-grained sender permission control, named SCPEKS. In SCPEKS, only those ciphertexts containing matching keywords and of which data sender attributes satisfy the authorized receiver policy will be returned to the data receiver. Also, we present a detailed construction of SCPEKS and prove that the instance achieves ciphertext indistinguishability and unforgeability. Moreover, comparisons with other related schemes suggest that the proposed scheme achieves flexible bidirectional access control at the expense of a slightly higher computation and communication cost.

Automated summary

PEKS is a promising cryptographic primitive that allows keyword search in ciphertexts, widely used in fields such as Cloud Computing and Internet of Things. Existing schemes mainly focus on data receiver control, ignoring data sender control. To address this, a concept of PEKS with fine-grained sender permission control has been introduced.