Efficient privacy preserving predicate encryption with fine-grained searchable capability for Cloud storage

Xu An Wang, Fatos Xhafa, Weiyi Cai, Jianfeng Ma, Fushan Wei
2016 Computers & electrical engineering  
With the fast development in Cloud storage technologies and ever increasing use of Cloud data centres, data privacy has become a must. Indeed, Cloud data centres store each time more sensitive data such as personal data, organizational and enterprise data, transactional data, etc. A commonplace solution is data encryption, however, achieving privacy and confidentiality with flexible searchable capability is a challenging issue. In this article, we show how to construct an efficient predicate
more » ... ryption with fine-grained searchable capability. Predicate Encryption (PE) can achieve more sophisticated and flexible functionality compared to traditional public key encryption. We propose an efficient predicate encryption scheme by utilizing the dual system encryption technique, which can also be proved to be IND-AH-CPA (indistinguishable under chosen plain-text attack for attribute-hiding) secure without random oracle. We also carefully analyze the relationship between predicate encryption and searchable encryption. To that end, we introduce a new notion of Public-Key Encryption with Fine-grained Keyword Search (PEFKS). Our results show that an IND-AH-CPA secure PE scheme can be used to construct an IND-PEFKS-CPA (indistinguishable under chosen plain-text attack for public-key encryption with fine-grained keyword search) secure PEFKS scheme. A new transformation of PEto-PEFKS is also proposed and used to construct an efficient PEFKS scheme based on the transformation from the proposed PE scheme. Finally, we design a new framework for supporting privacy preserving predicate encryption with fine-grained searchable capability for Cloud storage. Compared to most prominent frameworks, our framework satisfies more features altogether and can serve as a basis for developing such frameworks for Cloud data centres.
doi:10.1016/j.compeleceng.2016.05.012 fatcat:6omnffbjbraxffc57qbb7vnt5y