Semantic keyword searchable proxy re‐encryption for postquantum secure cloud storage

Abstract

SummaryWith the advent of cloud computing, more and more consumers prefer to use the cloud services with the pay‐as‐you‐consume mode. The cloud storage brings about great convenience to users, who store data in cloud and access to it using the smart devices anytime and anywhere. Consumers' information should be encrypted to guarantee the data privacy. Flexible searching on ciphertext is a critical challenge to be solved for effective data utilization. In this paper, we propose a novel semantic keyword searchable proxy re‐encryption scheme for secure cloud storage. A highlight of this work is that the scheme is quantum attack resistant, while most of the available searchable encryption schemes are not. It supports not only exact keyword search but also synonym keyword search. Moreover, the data owner is capable to delegate his search right to another user using the proxy re‐encryption mechanism. In the generation process of re‐encryption key, the delegator and delegatee do not need to be interactive with each other. The scheme is also collusion resistant. Under the learning with errors hardness problem, this scheme is proved secure in standard model.