Authorized keyword search over outsourced encrypted data in cloud environment

Abstract

For better data availability and accessibility while ensuring data secrecy, end-users often tend to outsource their data to the cloud servers in an encrypted form. However, this brings a major challenge to perform the search for some keywords over encrypted content without disclosing any information to unintended entities. This paper proposes a novel expressive authorized keyword search scheme relying on the concept of ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption. The originality of the proposed scheme is multifold. First, it supports the generic and convenient multi-owner and multi-user scenario, where the encrypted data are outsourced by several data owners and searchable by multiple users. Second, the formal security analysis proves that the proposed scheme is semantically secure against chosen keyword and outsider's keyword guessing attacks. Third, an interactive protocol is introduced which avoids the need of any secure channels between users and service provider. Fourth, due to the concept of bilinear-map accumulator, the system can efficiently revoke users and/or their attributes, and authenticate them prior to launching any expensive search operations. Fifth, conjunctive keyword search is provided thus enabling to search for multiple keywords simultaneously, with minimal cost. Sixth, the performance analysis shows that the proposed scheme outperforms closely-related works