Abstract
Abstract Within modern internet infrastructure including networks that are ubiquitous, there is often a need for delegatable communication between nodes without compromising the confidentiality of information. In practice, this should be enforced while allowing some basic functionality for intermediate delegated nodes such as searching through encrypted content. This can be achieved using a Public key encryption with keyword search (PEKS) scheme, first proposed by Boneh et al., which enables to search publicly encrypted messages for keywords without revealing any information about the message. The issue of PEKS schemes being vulnerable to keyword guessing attacks (KGAs) was first shown by Byun et al., and two of the most recent PEKS schemes, i.e., due to Rhee et al. in (ASIACCS, pp 376–379, 2009; IEICE Electron Express 6(5):237–243, 2009) and (J Syst Softw 83(5):763–771, 2010), respectively, are designed with this security in mind. In this paper, we treat this KGA problem in detail and define new security models to capture KGAs against PEKS and designated PEKS schemes. These models are more security sufficient than the model considered by Rhee et al. (J Syst Softw 83(5):763–771, 2010); indeed the latter model does not afford sufficient adversarial capability in the sense that it is much weaker than the adversarial capability considered in the original IND-CKA model of Boneh et al. Our new models allow to capture KGAs on three recent designated PEKS schemes that cannot be captured in the weaker model of Rhee et al.
Highlights
Within the distributed and ubiquitous nature of modern internet, where delegation of tasks often occurs among nodes, it is crucial that this delegation is performed while retaining some form of security
The proof sketch was constructed without defining a security model; the gist of the security argument is that the adversary cannot perform keyword guessing attacks because s/he has no knowledge of the private key skS of the server nor the private key skR of the receiver
We have proposed security models for both Public key encryption with keyword search (PEKS) and dPEKS schemes in the sense of keyword guessing under chosen keyword attacks (KG-CKA)
Summary
Within the distributed and ubiquitous nature of modern internet, where delegation of tasks often occurs among nodes, it is crucial that this delegation is performed while retaining some form of security. Public key encryption with keyword search (PEKS) schemes, first proposed in [4], can be useful in this respect. Users tend to query for a small set of keywords, for example, a user may search for some commonly used keywords such as “Urgent” in the “Subject” field of an email In this case, adversaries are able to exploit this to exhaustively guess some candidate keywords and verify the correctness of their guesses. The other PEKS model is with respect to the indistinguishability goal under chosen keyword attacks (IND-CKA) (e.g., see [4]) This latter model by definition was not designed to capture KGA and primarily differs in the adversarial goal. We show that our models can capture attacks that exist on three recent dPEKS schemes of [10–12] that would otherwise not have been captured by the weaker model of Rhee et al. Preliminaries
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
