An Efficient Multi-User Searchable Encryption Scheme without Query Transformation over Outsourced Encrypted Data

Abstract

Searchable Encryption (SE) schemes provide security and privacy to the cloud data. The existing SE approaches enable multiple users to perform search operation by using various schemes like Broadcast Encryption (BE), Attribute-Based Encryption (ABE), etc. However, these schemes do not allow multiple users to perform the search operation over the encrypted data of multiple owners. Some SE schemes involve a Proxy Server (PS) that allow multiple users to perform the search operation. However, these approaches incur huge computational burden on PS due to the repeated encryption of the user queries for transformation purpose so as to ensure that users' query is searchable over the encrypted data of multiple owners. Hence, to eliminate this computational burden on PS, this paper proposes a secure proxy server approach that performs the search operation without transforming the user queries. This approach also returns the top-k relevant documents to the user queries by using Euclidean distance similarity approach. Based on the experimental study, this approach is efficient with respect to search time and accuracy.