Verifiable searchable symmetric encryption for conjunctive keyword queries in cloud storage

Searchable symmetric encryption (SSE) has been introduced for secure outsourcing the encrypted database to cloud storage, while maintaining searchable features. Of various SSE schemes, most of them assume the server is honest but curious, while the server may be trustless in the real world. Considering a malicious server not honestly performing the queries, verifiable SSE (VSSE) schemes are constructed to ensure the verifiability of the search results. However, existing VSSE constructions only focus on single-keyword search or incur heavy computational cost during verification.

To address this challenge, a research team led by Joseph K. LIU published their new research on 02 April 2022 in Frontiers of Computer Science co-published by Higher Education Press and Springer Nature.

The team proposes a new VSSE construction supporting conjunctive keyword queries, which can be treated as an improvement of a recent VSSE solution. The proposed VSSE scheme is based on a privacy-preserving hash-based accumulator, by leveraging a well-established cryptographic primitive, Symmetric Hidden Vector Encryption (SHVE). The VSSE scheme enables both correctness and completeness verifiability for the result without pairing operations, thus greatly reducing the computational cost in the verification process.

For the future direction, one is to construct a public VSSE scheme by allowing any third-party to verify the search results. Another is to propose a forward private VSSE scheme supporting date update.

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Research Article, Published: 02 April 2022

Qingqing GAN, Joseph K. LIU, Xiaoming WANG, Xingliang YUAN, Shi-Feng SUN, Daxin HUANG, Cong ZUO, Jianfeng WANG. Verifiable searchable symmetric encryption for conjunctive keyword queries in cloud storage. Front. Comput. Sci., 2022, 16(6): 166820, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11704-021-0601-8

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