Abstract
While Searchable Encryption (SE) has been widely studied, adapting it to the multi-user setting whereby many users can upload secret files or documents and delegate search operations to multiple other users still remains an interesting problem. In this paper we show that the adversarial models used in existing multi-user searchable encryption solutions are not realistic as they implicitly require that the cloud service provider cannot collude with some users. We then propose a stronger adversarial model, and propose a construction which is both practical and provably secure in this new model. The new solution combines the use of bilinear pairings with private information retrieval and introduces a new, non trusted entity called “proxy” to transform each user’s search query into one instance per targeted file or document.
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Notes
- 1.
Note that the set of targeted document can reveal the authorized set of documents for this particular user. However, such an additional information does not have a serious impact on index or query privacy as access pattern leakage has.
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Acknowledgements
The authors thank the anonymous reviewers for their suggestions for improving this paper.
This work was partially funded by the FP7-USERCENTRICNETWORKING european ICT project (grant 611001).
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Van Rompay, C., Molva, R., Önen, M. (2015). Multi-user Searchable Encryption in the Cloud. In: Lopez, J., Mitchell, C. (eds) Information Security. ISC 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9290. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-23318-5_17
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-23318-5_17
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