An Efficient Searchable Public-Key Authenticated Encryption for Cloud-Assisted Medical Internet of Things

Abstract

In recent years, it has become popular to upload patients’ medical data to a third-party cloud server (TCS) for storage through medical Internet of things. It can reduce the local maintenance burden of the medical data and importantly improve accuracy in the medical treatment. As remote TCS cannot be fully trusted, medical data should be encrypted before uploading, to protect patients’ privacy. However, encryption makes search capabilities difficult for patients and doctors. To address this issue, Huang et al. recently put forward the notion of Public-key Authenticated Encryption with Keyword Search (PAEKS) against inside keyword guessing attacks. However, the existing PAEKS schemes rely on time-consuming computation of parings. Moreover, some PAEKS schemes still have security issues in a multiuser setting. In this paper, we propose a new and efficient PAEKS scheme, which uses the idea of Diffie-Hellman key agreement to generate a shared secret key between each sender and receiver. The shared key will be used to encrypt keywords by the sender and to generate search trapdoors by the receiver. We prove that our scheme is semantically secure against inside keyword guessing attacks in a multiuser setting, under the oracle Diffie-Hellman assumption. Experimental results demonstrate that our PAEKS scheme is more efficient than that of previous ones, especially in terms of keyword searching time.