SWMQ: Secure wildcard pattern matching with query

Abstract

Secure wildcard pattern matching (WPM) allows the pattern holder to obtain the matched positions without revealing pattern and text information about both parties. However, standard secure WPM may have limitations in practical applications, as users may prefer to have access to the actual data of the match in many scenarios. Fortunately, secure wildcard pattern matching with query (SWMQ) extends standard secure WPM by allowing the pattern holder to obtain the matched positions and the actual data, which has important applications in many scenarios, such as electronic healthcare and gene matching. This also motivates the research of SWMQ in this paper. In this study, we focus on the efficient construction of SWMQ in the semihonest adversary setting. First, we propose two new primitives, hereafter referred to as shared wildcard pattern matching (Sh-WPM) and choice-sharing oblivious transfer (CSOT). Furthermore, we propose an SWMQ protocol via Shared WPM and CSOT. In addition, we evaluate the performance of SWMQ. More specifically, the running time in local area network and wide area network settings is less than 0.4 and 2 s, respectively, when the text length is 2 16 ${2}^{16}$ and the pattern length is 2 12 ${2}^{12}$ . In fact, our evaluation results suggest that SWMQ is not only more broadly functional, but also comparable in efficiency to state-of-the-art approaches.