A Survey of Provably Secure Searchable Encryption

Abstract

We survey the notion of provably secure searchable encryption (SE) by giving a complete and comprehensive overview of the two main SE techniques: searchable symmetric encryption (SSE) and public key encryption with keyword search (PEKS). Since the pioneering work of Song, Wagner, and Perrig (IEEE S&P '00), the field of provably secure SE has expanded to the point where we felt that taking stock would provide benefit to the community. The survey has been written primarily for the nonspecialist who has a basic information security background. Thus, we sacrifice full details and proofs of individual constructions in favor of an overview of the underlying key techniques. We categorize and compare the different SE schemes in terms of their security, efficiency, and functionality. For the experienced researcher, we point out connections between the many approaches to SE and identify open research problems. Two major conclusions can be drawn from our work. While the so-called IND-CKA2 security notion becomes prevalent in the literature and efficient (sublinear) SE schemes meeting this notion exist in the symmetric setting, achieving this strong form of security efficiently in the asymmetric setting remains an open problem. We observe that in multirecipient SE schemes, regardless of their efficiency drawbacks, there is a noticeable lack of query expressiveness that hinders deployment in practice.

PaaSword: A Holistic Data Privacy and Security by Design Framework for Cloud Services

“…In addition to that, we plan to extend the previous work Cumulus4j [18] and MimoSecco [13] in such a way that will fit the needs of the aforementioned SSE scheme. Cumulus4j and MimoSecco presented a SSE scheme that was based on the IND-ICP security notion [2] that hides relations between different data values of a data row and creates the base for secure database outsourcing.…”

“…Additionally, a user revocation function is supported by the framework in order to exclude a user, which either acts maliciously or has no longer access rights. This is a crucial and challenging procedure, if we consider that many of the existing SSE schemes [2] do not support user revocation and thus are susceptible to many attacks (Fig. 1).…”

Enforcing Privacy in Cloud Databases

“…SE allows the CSP to run keyword-based searches on encrypted data [63] that are particularly suitable to data outsourcing [16]. Considering a set of documents {D i } i=1,n and an index of keywords {w j } j=1,m describing the documents, users encrypt both documents D i with any secure encryption scheme using a key K Enc and keywords w j with a searchable scheme using a key K Index .…”

“…SE induces a trade-off between security, efficiency and query expressiveness. SE schemes with higher levels of security induce higher complexity, while SE schemes supporting more query types are either less secure and/or less efficient [16]. Moreover, most SE schemes reveal access patterns, i.e., which documents contain a keyword.…”

Searchable Data Vault: Encrypted Queries in Secure Distributed Cloud Storage

“…In addition, fully hidden searchable encryption scheme can potentially be achieved using building blocks such as fully homomorphic encryption [32] and ORAM [33,34], but schemes based on these will be less efficient compared to SSE schemes. For a comprehensive survey, we refer interested readers to [35].…”