With the distributed sensors that are deployed to monitor the urban environment in smart cities, the sensed data are overwhelming and beyond the scope of the wireless sensor networks (WSNs) capability. Due to the communication range limits of the sensors, most of these data will be outsourced and stored on some untrusted servers. Thus, how to maintain the data confidentiality and integrity, as well as source authentication and data query privacy of the outsourced data, is a challenging problem.

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... In this paper, we propose a secure searchable encryption scheme, named SSE, for urban sensing and querying to address the problem. Specifically, our SSE constructs a secure hidden vector encryption-(HVE-) based rang query predicate. The sensed data can be stored on an untrusted server in encrypted form. A requester can obtain the correct ciphertexts when his authorized range query matches the HVE-based encryption predicate. With the help of the base station, the ciphertexts can be decrypted and data integrity can be verified; then, the requester can obtain the correct original data. Security analysis demonstrates that; in the SSE, only the authorized requesters can obtain the query results, while the data confidentiality and integrity and source authentication are also preserved.