Efficient public key authenticated searchable encryption scheme without bilinear pairings

Abstract

The issue of searching for data within ciphertext files in cloud storage is effectively resolved through public key encryption with keyword search (PEKS). The main security problem it has is the internal keyword guessing attack (IKGA), for which Huang et al. proposed a novel scheme, public key authenticated encryption with keyword search (PAEKS), which employs a combination of encryption and authentication to enhance the security of the scheme. Most PAEKS algorithms utilize bilinear pairings, which are inherently costly from a computational perspective and also offer only single-keyword ciphertext security guarantees. In light of the aforementioned considerations, this paper presents a PAEKS scheme that does not employ bilinear pairings. The scheme is demonstrated to satisfy the criteria of multi-ciphertext and multi-trapdoor security, based on the DDH assumption. Furthermore, the parallel search method is employed during the search phase with the objective of enhancing the overall efficiency of the search process. Ultimately, the experimental results demonstrate that the computational time of the proposed scheme is reduced by a factor of 7 to 28 compared to other schemes using bilinear pairings, and our scheme has higher search efficiency and is more suitable for practical applications.