IDCrypt: A Multi-User Searchable Symmetric Encryption Scheme for Cloud Applications

Searchable Encryption (SE) has been extensively examined by both academic and industry researchers. While many academic SE schemes show provable security, they usually expose some query information (e.g., search and access patterns) to achieve high efficiency. However, several inference attacks have exploited such leakage, e.g., a query recovery attack can convert opaque query trapdoors to their corresponding keywords based on some prior knowledge. On the other hand, many proposed SE schemes require significant modification of existing applications, which makes them less practical, weak in usability, and difficult to deploy. In this paper, we introduce a secure and practical searchable symmetric encryption scheme with provable security strength for cloud applications, called IDCrypt, which improves the search efficiency, and enhances the security strength of SE using symmetric cryptography. We further point out the main challenges in securely searching on multiple indexes and sharing encrypted data between multiple users. To address the above issues, we propose a token-adjustment search scheme to preserve the search functionality among multi-indexes, and a key sharing scheme which combines identity-based encryption and public-key encryption. Our experimental results show that the overhead of the key sharing scheme is fairly low.

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