MK-RS-PKE: Multi-Keyword Ranked Searchable Public-Key Encryption for Cloud-Assisted Lightweight Platforms

Abstract

Since more and more data from lightweight platforms like IoT devices or mobile apps are being outsourced to the cloud, the need to ensure privacy while retaining data usability is essential. This paper designs a framework where lightweight platforms like IoT devices can encrypt documents and generate document indexes using the public key before uploading the document to the cloud. An admin can search and retrieve the top-k most relevant documents that match a multi-keyword query using the private key. Most existing searchable encryption that supports IoT returns all the documents matching queried keywords. However, IoT devices can produce massive data, which is not practical for such schemes. We formally name our framework Multi-keyword Ranked Searchable Public-Key Encryption (MK-RS-PKE).