An Efficient Verifiable Attribute-based Keyword Search Technique for Outsourced Encrypted Data in Cloud

Abstract

It is common nowadays for data owners to outsource their data to the cloud. As the cloud cannot be completely trusted, the outsourced data needs to be encrypted.However this even brings a range of issues, such as: How should a data owner grant search permission to the data users? How can the authorized data users search over a data owner have outsourced encrypted data? How can the data users be assured that the cloud successfully execute the search operations on their side? To solve these questions, we propose a new cryptographic solution, called verifiable attribute-based keyword search (VABKS). The solution allows a data user, whose credentials satisfy a data owner’s access control policy, to (i) searching over the data owner’s outsourced encrypted data, (ii) outsource the complicated search operations to the cloud, and (iii) check whether the cloud has faithfully executed the search operations. We now define the security requirements of VABKS and describe a construction that satisfies them. Performance evaluation shows that the proposed schemes are practical and deployable.
Key words: ABE; ABKS; CP-ABE; KP-ABE; VABK