Hierarchical Identity-Based Authenticated Encryption with Keyword Search over encrypted cloud data

Abstract

AbstractWith the rapid development of cloud computing technology, cloud storage services are becoming more and more mature. However, the storage of sensitive data on remote servers poses privacy risks and is presently a source of concern. Searchable Encryption (SE) is an effective method for protecting sensitive data while preserving server-side searchability. Hierarchical Public key Encryption with Keyword Search (HPEKS), a new variant of SE, allows users with higher access permission to search over encrypted data sent to lower-level users. To the best of our knowledge, there exist only four HPEKS schemes in the literature. Two of them are in traditional public-key setting, and the remaining ones are identity-based public key cryptosystems. Unfortunately, all of the four existing HPEKS schemes are vulnerable against inside Keyword Guessing Attacks (KGAs). Moreover, all of the existing HPEKS schemes are based on the computationally expensive bilinear pairing operation which dramatically increases the computational costs. To overcome these issues, in this paper, we introduce the notion of Hierarchical Identity-Based Authenticated Encryption with Keyword Search (HIBAEKS). We formulate a security model for HIBAEKS and propose an efficient pairing-free HIBAEKS scheme. We then prove that the proposed HIBAEKS scheme is secure under the defined security model and is resistant against KGAs. Finally, we compare our proposed scheme with related constructions regarding security requirements, computational and communication costs to indicate the overall superiority of our proposed scheme.