Multi-Keyword Searchable and Verifiable Attribute-Based Encryption Over Cloud Data

Abstract

In cloud data sharing systems, Searchable Encryption (SE) schemes ensure data confidentiality with retrieving, but it faces several issues in practice. First, most of the previous Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-Based Keyword Search (CP-ABKS) systems enable users to initiate search requests with a single keyword, which results in many inaccurate results to be returned, thereby wasting computing and bandwidth resources. Second, untrusted cloud servers may return a small portion of incomplete search results to compress communication overhead. Besides, most CP-ABKS schemes only support an unshared multi-owner setting, which incurs a large amount of computational and storage overhead. Furthermore, when the keyword space is a polynomial, most of the previous schemes suffer from offline keyword guessing attacks. To address these issues, we focus on a multi-keyword search scheme which supports the verification of search results without losing efficiency by combining Ciphertext Policy Attribute-Based Encryption (CP-ABE) technology under the shared multi-owner mechanism. We show the security of our scheme, which achieves selective security against offline keyword guessing attacks and guarantees the unforgeability of signatures. The comparison of experimental results illustrates that our scheme is effective and enjoys superior functionalities than the most relevant solutions.