ISEkFT

Abstract

Public-key encryption with keyword search (PEKS) is a well-known technique which allows searching on encrypted data using the public key system. However, this technique suffers from the keyword guessing attack (KGA). To address this problem, a modified version of PEKS called public key encryption with fuzzy keyword search (PEFKS) has been introduced where each keyword is associated with an exact search trapdoor (EST) and a fuzzy search trapdoor (FST) which is provided to the cloud server. PEFKS prevents KGA in such a way that two or maximum three keywords share the same FST. Hence, even if the cloud server knows the FST it cannot link it to the corresponding keyword. But, with a probability of 1/3 the malicious cloud server can still guess the keyword corresponding to FST. Therefore, in this article, the authors present an approach which can improve the security of the PEFKS technique by reducing the probability of guessing the keyword to 1/k where k is the number of keywords that share the same FST, thus enhancing the overall reliability. In addition, the authors have used an identity-based encryption (IBE) as an underlying technique to construct the searchable encryption scheme and proved its security in the standard model.