Revokable Blockchain-Enabled Ranked Multi-Keyword Attribute-Based Searchable Encryption Scheme With Mobile Edge Computing for Vehicular

Abstract

The Internet of Vehicles (IoV) faces critical challenges in balancing real-time data processing, privacy preservation, and secure data sharing amid growing intelligent transportation demands. While mobile edge computing (MEC) reduces latency by offloading tasks to MEC servers, efficient encrypted search and dynamic access control remain unresolved. Attribute-based keyword search (ABKS) enables privacy-preserving queries on encrypted data but exhibits critical limitations such as lack of revocable access for dynamic user privileges, exposed access policy that risk sensitive attribute leakage, and data integrity verification. Moreover, existing ABKS schemes further suffer from centralized key management in attribute-based encryption (ABE), introducing single points of failure and key escrow issues. To address these issues, we propose BC-RMABSE, a blockchain-enabled ABKS scheme. Our scheme leverages the vector space model to enable ranked multi-keyword searches, returning top-k relevant results for improved efficiency. Policy-hiding mechanisms and attribute revocation ensure flexible fine-grained access control while safeguarding sensitive attributes. A decentralized key distribution strategy using Pedersen’s (k, n) secret sharing protocol eliminates reliance on central authority, mitigating security risks. Blockchain technology enforces data integrity through tamper-proof consensus and resolves the “service-payment” imbalance via smart contracts, ensuring transactional fairness between users and untrusted service providers. Experimental analysis indicates that our scheme performs well in terms of both security and search efficiency.