An Efficient Verifiable Searchable Encryption Scheme With Aggregating Authorization for Blockchain-Enabled IoT

Abstract

Blockchain-enabled Internet of Things (IoT) provides a secure sharing of data and resources to the various miners of the IoT network, removes centralized control, and can overcome part of the existing challenges in traditional IoT. However, the IoT ecosystem faces some great challenges in terms of security, such as privacy leaking, eavesdropping, and so on, which seriously impede the deployment of the IoT ecosystem. Verifiable searchable encryption (SE) can make data owners (DOs) in the IoT dispel concerns about privacy and make data users (DUs) believe they get correct search results. For the blockchain-enabled IoT, this article proposes an efficient verification SE scheme with aggregation authorization and trusted revocation. With this scheme, DOs are willing to share their data to DUs for reward in a secure, efficient, and trusted way. For the DU, the DO can generate an aggregating key of a subset of encrypted documents, and then the DU has the privilege to search these documents and to verify the search results. By utilizing the trusted execution environment, the DO can revoke the search privilege of the DU. We present the analysis to show our proposed scheme achieves confidentiality, soundness, and fair payment at the same time. With the performance evaluations, we prove our proposal practical for blockchain-enabled IoT in terms of computational and smart contracts overhead.