Tree-Based Public Key Encryption with Conjunctive Keyword Search

Abstract

Searchable public key encryption supporting conjunctive keyword search is an important technique in today’s cloud environment. Nowadays, previous schemes usually take advantage of forward index structure, which leads to a linear search complexity. In order to obtain better search efficiency, in this paper, we utilize a tree index structure instead of forward index to realize such schemes. To achieve the goal, we first give a set of keyword conversion methods that can convert the index and query keywords into a group of vectors and then present a novel algorithm for building index tree based on these vectors. Finally, by combining an efficient predicate encryption scheme to encrypt the index tree, a tree-based public key encryption with conjunctive keyword search scheme is proposed. The proposed scheme is proven to be secure against chosen plaintext attacks and achieves a sublinear search complexity. Moreover, both theoretical analysis and experimental result show that the proposed scheme is efficient and feasible for practical applications.