Public Key Authenticated Encryption With Designated Equality Test and its Applications in Diagnostic Related Groups

Due to the massive growth of data and security concerns, data of patients would be encrypted and outsourced to the cloud server for feature matching in various medical scenarios, such as personal health record systems, actuarial judgments and diagnostic related groups. Public key encryption with equality test (PKEET) is a useful utility for encrypted feature matching. Authorized tester could perform data matching on encrypted data without decrypting. Unfortunately, due to the limited terminology in medicine, people within institutions may illegally use data, trying to obtain information through traversal methods. In this paper we propose a new PKEET notion, called public-key authenticated encryption with designated equality test (PKAE-DET), which could resist this kind of attacks launched by an inside adversary, known as offline message recovery attacks (OMRA). We propose a concrete construction of PKAE-DET, which only requires one single server to perform the feature matching job securely, and does not require any group mechanism. We prove its security based on some simple mathematical assumptions. Experimental results show that our scheme has efficiency comparable with those PKEET schemes which do not resist OMRA attacks or require group mechanism. We further show how our scheme could be effectively used in diagnostic related groups in medicine, demonstrating its practicability.