Verifiable Key-Aggregate Searchable Encryption With a Designated Server in Multi-Owner Setting

Key-aggregate searchable encryption (KASE) schemes support selective data sharing and keyword-based ciphertext searching by using the constant-size shared key and trapdoor, making these schemes attractive for resource-constrained users to store, share, and search encrypted data in public clouds. However, most previously proposed KASE schemes suffer from our proposed “off-line keyword guessing attack (KGA)” and some other weaknesses. Consequently, they fail to gain the keyword ciphertext indistinguishability and trapdoor indistinguishability, which are vital security goals of searchable encryption. Inspired by the relationship of public key encryption with keyword search (PEKS) and KASE, we design a new KASE scheme called key-aggregate searchable encryption with a designated server (dKASE). The dKASE scheme achieves our proposed keyword ciphertext indistinguishability against chosen keyword attack (KC-IND-CKA) and keyword trapdoor indistinguishability against keyword guessing attack (KT-IND-KGA) security models, where the latter model captures off-line KGA. Then, we extend the dKASE scheme to verifiable dKASE in multi-owner setting (dVKASEM) scheme. With dVKASEM, when multiple data owners authorize a user to access data, the user merely needs to store his single key and generate a single trapdoor to query these owners’ data. Besides, the adoption of the aggregate signature significantly reduces the overhead of verifying whether data has been tampered with. Performance analysis illustrates that our schemes are efficient.