Blockchain Search Using Searchable Encryption Based on Elliptic Curves

Abstract

AbstractNowadays there are more key technologies, such as cloud computing, big data, blockchain, and different techniques that process the data via a well-established purpose. The security of data should be a significant aspect of any type of system, therefore the systems should implement security techniques that solve this aspect. A relatively new encryption technique is searchable encryption, which enables the user to submit search queries based on chosen criteria (for example, keywords) to the cloud server on which the encrypted data (in the form of encrypted documents) is stored. Another emerging technology is blockchain, a decentralized approach for data sharing, based on a direct communication between two peers. To protect the data and its integrity, blockchain uses cryptographic mechanisms and strong mathematics computations as challenges that need to be solved by the nodes that adheres to the blockchain network. In this paper, we propose a searchable encryption scheme, which can be used in the cloud environment, based on elliptic curves and symmetric bilinear mapping for its algorithms and blockchain to store the indexes structure and to process the search query. Using elliptic curves, the proposed scheme is efficient, as it is proven in the literature that elliptic curve cryptography is usually faster than other encryption systems with the same level of security.