Controlled Search: Building Inverted-Index PEKS With Less Leakage in Multiuser Setting

Abstract

The public key encryption with keyword search (PEKS) schemes are mostly applied to small data sets in mail forwarding systems. When retrieving large databases, the typical search mechanism makes them inefficient and impractical. When designing a PEKS scheme, except for remedying the vulnerability of Keyword Guessing Attacks (KGA), other leakage issues such as multi-pattern privacy and forward/backward security are rarely considered, which may lead to information leakage. Moreover, most existing PEKS only consider applications in single-user scenarios, and cannot be directly transferred to multi-user scenarios, which undermines the value of data utilization. To cope with the above concerns, we propose a PEKS scheme based on an inverted index where the bitmap is used to build the index for the first time in PEKS to meet some seemingly conflicting yet desirable characteristics. Firstly, it has high search efficiency under multi-writer and multi-user. Through linear transformation, users quickly retrieve data and control other users’ access to their data without relying on a third party for authentication. Secondly, we prove its security in an enhanced security model that achieves multi-pattern privacy and forward and backward security. It can also resist KGA attacks without a designated tester, which makes it more practical. Finally, it can be extended to achieve search result verification. Compare to the scheme (Zhang et al. ICWS 2016), it has absolute advantages in security and computational cost where the search efficiency is improved by two orders of magnitude.