An efficient public-key searchable encryption scheme secure against inside keyword guessing attacks

How to efficiently search over encrypted data is an important and interesting problem in the cloud era. To solve it, Boneh et al. introduced the notion of public key encryption with keyword search (PEKS), in 2004. However, in almost all the PEKS schemes an inside adversary may recover the keyword from a given trapdoor by exhaustively guessing the keywords offline. How to resist the inside keyword guessing attack in PEKS remains a hard problem. In this paper we propose introduce the notion of Public-key Authenticated Encryption with Keyword Search (PAEKS) to solve the problem, in which the data sender not only encrypts a keyword, but also authenticates it, so that a verifier would be convinced that the encrypted keyword can only be generated by the sender. We propose a concrete and efficient construction of PAEKS, and prove its security based on simple and static assumptions in the random oracle model under the given security models. Experimental results show that our scheme enjoys a comparable efficiency with Boneh et al.'s scheme. (C) 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.