Symmetric Searchable Encryption with Efficient Conjunctive Keyword Search

Abstract

Searchable encryption is a cryptographic protocol for searching a document in encrypted databases. A simple searchable encryption protocol, which is capable of using only one keyword at one time, is very limited and cannot satisfy demands of various applications. Thus, designing a searchable encryption with useful additional functions, for example, conjunctive keyword search, is one of the most important goals. There have been many attempts to construct a searchable encryption with conjunctive keyword search. However, most of the previously proposed protocols are based on public-key cryptosystems which require a large amount of computational cost. Moreover, the amount of computation in search procedure depends on the number of documents stored in the database. These previously proposed protocols are not suitable for extremely large data sets. In this paper, we propose a new searchable encryption protocol with a conjunctive keyword search based on a linked tree structure instead of public-key based techniques. The protocol requires a remarkably small computational cost, particularly when applied to extremely large databases. Actually, the amount of computation in search procedure depends on the number of documents matched to the query, instead of the size of the entire database.