Blockchain-Enabled Public Key Encryption with Multi-Keyword Search in Cloud Computing

Abstract

The emergence of the cloud storage has brought great convenience to people’s life. Many individuals and enterprises have delivered a large amount of data to the third-party server for storage. Thus, the privacy protection of data retrieved by the user needs to be guaranteed. Searchable encryption technology for the cloud environment is adopted to ensure that the user information is secure with retrieving data. However, most schemes only support single-keyword search and do not support file updates, which limit the flexibility of the scheme. To eliminate these problems, we propose a blockchain-enabled public key encryption scheme with multi-keyword search (BPKEMS), and our scheme supports file updates. In addition, smart contract is used to ensure the fairness of transactions between data owner and user without introducing a third party. At the data storage stage, our scheme realizes the verifiability by numbering the files, which ensures that the ciphertext received by the user is complete. In terms of security and performance, our scheme is secure against inside keyword guessing attacks (KGAs) and has better computation overhead than other related schemes.