A Survey of Public-Key Encryption With Search Functionality for Cloud-Assisted IoT

Abstract

Nowadays, Internet of Things (IoT) is an attractive system to provide broad connectivity of a wide range of applications, and clouds are natural promoters. Cloud-assisted IoT combines the advantages of cloud computing and IoT, which is able to collect data from the real world and maximizes the value of the collected data by the means of data sharing and data analysis. Meanwhile, secure and convenient data retrieval in cloud servers becomes an important requirement for both enterprises and individual users. Public-key encryption with search functionality (shorten as PKE-SF) is a widely used cryptographic technique that allows users to retrieve encrypted data without decryption. PKE-SF mainly contains the primitives of public-key encryption with keyword search (PKE-KS), public-key encryption with equality test (PKE-ET), and plaintext-checkable encryption (PCE). In light of the overwhelming variety and multitude of PKE-SF schemes, this survey presents these schemes from different perspectives to provide better comprehension for beginners and advanced researchers. More concretely, this survey concentrates on the state of the art of PKE-SF by analyzing the design rationale, examining the framework and security model, and assessing the existing schemes in accordance with theoretic efficiency, security properties, and experimental performance. Furthermore, we discuss the extensions of traditional PKE-SF schemes which feature with the access control delegation, conjunctive keyword search, certificate-free, and offline keyword guessing attack resilience. Finally, we point out some promising directions for readers.