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Efficient searchable symmetric encryption supporting range queries

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Abstract

The demand for cloud storage services continuously increases putting at risk the privacy of the outsourced data. Data encryption is the obvious solution, a well-studied and mature technology. However, it does not support search queries on encrypted data and the server cannot process the outsourced data in their protected form. To counteract this problem, several cryptographic solutions have been proposed, like (fully) homomorphic encryption, multi-party computation, and property preserving encryption. However, all these technologies are either impractical or weak. One of the most promising cryptographic techniques for searching encrypted data is searchable symmetric encryption (SSE). SSE schemes offer a nice trade-off between security and efficiency. Since 2000 and the introduction of SSE from as reported by Song et al. (in: Proceedings of the IEEE computer society symposium on research in security and privacy, 2000), most of the research has been concentrated on schemes that support single keyword queries. In this paper, we investigate the much less explored area of range queries SSE. More precisely, we present a way to leverage inverse index computed for single keyword to compute range queries. This is a nice theoretical result that has its own interest. We also introduce a SSE scheme that supports both single keyword and range queries, building on the new inverted index. Our SSE scheme offers oblivious memory accesses, and it can be used in key-value databases. We prove the scheme’s security and we evaluate its performance, both in theory and in practice.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of the Aegean, Samos, Greece

    Eirini Molla

  2. Harokopio University, Athens, Greece

    Panagiotis Rizomiliotis

  3. University of Piraeus, Athens, Greece

    Stefanos Gritzalis

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  1. Eirini Molla
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  2. Panagiotis Rizomiliotis
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  3. Stefanos Gritzalis
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Correspondence to Eirini Molla.

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Molla, E., Rizomiliotis, P. & Gritzalis, S. Efficient searchable symmetric encryption supporting range queries. Int. J. Inf. Secur. 22, 785–798 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10207-023-00667-1

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