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Verifiable searchable symmetric encryption for conjunctive keyword queries in cloud storage

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Abstract

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, we present an efficient VSSE scheme, built on OXT protocol (Cash et al., CRYPTO 2013), for conjunctive keyword queries with sublinear search overhead. 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). Our VSSE scheme enables both correctness and completeness verifiability for the result without pairing operations, thus greatly reducing the computational cost in the verification process. Besides, the proposed VSSE scheme can still provide a proof when the search result is empty. Finally, the security analysis and experimental evaluation are given to demonstrate the security and practicality of the proposed scheme.

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Acknowledgements

This work was partially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 61932010 and 62072357), and the Zhuhai Top Discipline-Information Security. This work was also supported by the China Scholarship Council (CSC) and the Australian Research Council (ARC).

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Guangzhou Key Laboratory of Multilingual Intelligent Processing, School of Information Science and Technology/School of Cyber Security, Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, Guangzhou, 510006, China

    Qingqing Gan

  2. Department of Computer Science, Jinan University, Guangzhou, 510632, China

    Qingqing Gan, Xiaoming Wang & Daxin Huang

  3. Faculty of Information Technology, Monash University, Clayton, 3168, Australia

    Joseph K. Liu, Xingliang Yuan, Shi-Feng Sun & Cong Zuo

  4. State Key Laboratory of Integrated Service Networks (ISN), Xidian University, Xi’an, 710071, China

    Jianfeng Wang

Authors
  1. Qingqing Gan
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  5. Shi-Feng Sun
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  7. Cong Zuo
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  8. Jianfeng Wang
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Joseph K. Liu.

Additional information

Qingqing Gan received the MSc degree in software engineering and the PhD degree in computer application technology at Jinan University, China. Currently, she is working as a lecturer in the School of Information Science and Technology/School of Cyber Security, Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, China. As a visiting PhD candidate, she has been studied at Faculty of Information Technology, Monash University, Australia for one year. Her research interests include applied cryptography and data privacy-preserving.

Joseph K. Liu received his PhD degree from the Chinese University of Hong Kong, China at 2004. He is currently working as an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Information Technology, Monash University, Australia. He has established the Monash Blockchain Technology Centre at 2019 and serves as the founding director. His research interests include blockchain, cloud security, big data security, lightweight security, and applied cryptography.

Xiaoming Wang received the BSc degree from Harbin Institute of Technology, China, and the PhD degree from Nankai University, China. She is currently working as a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Jinan University, China. Her research interests include security and privacy in network and distributed systems, such as cloud computing with a focus on security protocol designs and access control.

Xingliang Yuan received the BS degree from Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications, China in 2008, the MS degree from Illinois Institute of Technology, USA in 2009, both in Electrical Engineering, and the PhD degree in Computer Science from City University of Hong Kong, China in 2016. He is currently working as a lecturer in the Faculty of Information Technology, Monash University, Australia. His research interests include cloud security, NFV security, and privacy-aware computing.

Shi-Feng Sun received the PhD degree in computer science and technology from Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China in 2016. During the PhD degree, he was a Visiting Scholar with The University of Melbourne, Australia for more than one year. He was working as a lecturer in the Faculty of Information Technology, Monash University, Australia, from April 2020 to September 2021. His research interests include cryptography and data privacy, particularly in provably secure cryptosystems, data privacy-preserving technology in cloud storage, and privacy-enhancing technology in block-chain.

Daxin Huang received the BSc degree in network engineering from Dongguan University of Technology, China in 2018. Currently, he studies for the MSc degree in computer technology at Jinan University, China. His research interests include applied cryptography, security and privacy in cloud computing.

Cong Zuo received the BS degree from the School of Computer Engineering, Nanjing Institute of Technology, and the MS degree from the School of Computer Science and Information Engineering, Zhejiang Gongshang University, China. He is currently pursuing the PhD degree with Monash University, Australia under the supervision of Dr. Joseph K. Liu and Shi-Feng Sun. He is also affiliated with Data61 and his Data61 supervisor is Josef Pieprzyk. His main research interest is applied cryptography.

Jianfeng Wang received the MS degree in mathematics and the PhD degree in cryptography from Xidian University, China in 2016. He visited the Swinburne University of Technology, Australia from December 2017 to December 2018. He is currently with working as an Associate Professor in Xidian University, China. His research interests include applied cryptography, cloud security, and searchable encryption.

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Gan, Q., Liu, J.K., Wang, X. et al. Verifiable searchable symmetric encryption for conjunctive keyword queries in cloud storage. Front. Comput. Sci. 16, 166820 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11704-021-0601-8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11704-021-0601-8

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