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EVSS: An efficient verifiable search scheme over encrypted cloud data

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Abstract

Cloud computing is now being used by more and more enterprises and individuals. To protect the privacy of outsourced data in the cloud, the searchable symmetric encryption is adopted. However, verifying search results to detect whether there is malicious behavior in the cloud server is still a challenge. In order to overcome this problem, we propose an efficient verifiable search scheme (EVSS), which allows users to retrieve ciphertext and verify the search result efficiently. A novel RSA accumulator-based Patricia tree (RAP-tree) is designed as the search index, where the token of a keyword and the proof evidence of documents containing the keyword are taken as the key-value pair to be placed in a node of the tree. By using the RAP-tree index, the efficient verifiable keyword search over encrypted data is realized. The security of the proposed scheme is analyzed by theoretical proofs. Experimental results on real data sets show that the proposed scheme is efficient and effective in terms of search processing and result verification.

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Data availability

Details of the datasets have been described in Section 7.

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Funding

This work is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under the grant Nos.61872197, 61972209, 61902199 and 61771251; the Postdoctoral Science Foundation of China under the Grand No. 2019M651919; the Postgraduate Research and Practice Innovation Program of Jiangsu Province under the Grand No. KYCX22_0984.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Modern Posts, Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Nanjing, 210023, China

    Qian Zhou

  2. School of Computer Science, Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Nanjing, 210023, China

    Hua Dai, Wenjie Sheng, Yuanlong Liu & Geng Yang

  3. Jiangsu Key Laboratory of Big Data Security and Intelligent Processing, Nanjing, 210023, China

    Hua Dai & Geng Yang

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  1. Qian Zhou
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  4. Yuanlong Liu
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  5. Geng Yang
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Contributions

This work thanks the following authors for their contributions: Qian Zhou and Hua Dai contributed to the conception of the study; Qian Zhou and Wenjie Sheng performed the experiment; Qian Zhou and Yuanlong Liu contributed significantly to analysis and manuscript preparation; Hua Dai and Wenjie Sheng performed the data analyses and wrote the manuscript; Geng Yang helped perform the analysis with constructive discussions.

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Correspondence to Hua Dai.

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Zhou, Q., Dai, H., Sheng, W. et al. EVSS: An efficient verifiable search scheme over encrypted cloud data. World Wide Web 26, 1459–1479 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11280-022-01097-0

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11280-022-01097-0

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