Practical Multi-Keyword and Boolean Search Over Encrypted E-mail in Cloud Server

With the outbreak of e-mail message leakage events, such as the Hillary Clinton's Email Controversy, privacy and security of sensitive e-mail information have become users' primary concern. Encrypted email seems to be a viable solution for providing security, but it will greatly limit their operations. Public encryption with keyword search (PEKS) scheme is a popular technology to incorporate security protection and favorable operability functions together, which can play an important role in searching over encrypted email in a cloud server. In this paper, we propose a practical PEKS scheme named as public-key multi-keyword searchable encryption with hidden structures (PMSEHS). It could enable e-mail receivers to do the multi-keyword and boolean search in the large encrypted email database as fast as possible, without revealing more information to the cloud server. We also give comparative experiments, which demonstrate that our scheme has a higher efficiency in multi-keyword search for encrypted emails.

Automated summary

This paper proposes a practical PEKS scheme named PMSEHS that allows email receivers to perform multi-keyword and boolean search in encrypted email database efficiently while protecting their privacy in the cloud server. Comparative experiments show that the scheme is more efficient in multi-keyword search for encrypted emails.