Abstract
Data outsourcing has become an industry trend with the popularity of cloud computing. How to search data securely and efficiently has received unprecedented attention. Dynamic Searchable Symmetric Encryption (DSSE) is an effective method to solve this problem, which supports file updates and keyword-based searches over encrypted data. Unfortunately, most existing DSSE schemes have privacy leakages during the addition and deletion phases, thus proposing the concepts of forward and backward privacy. At present, some secure DSSE schemes with forward and backward privacy have been proposed, but most of these DSSE schemes only achieve single-keyword query in the single-client setting, which seriously limits the application in practice. To solve this problem, we propose a multi-client and multi-keyword searchable symmetric encryption scheme with forward and backward privacy (MMKFB). Our scheme focuses on the multi-keyword threshold queries in the multi-client setting, which is a new pattern of multi-keyword search realized with the help of additive homomorphism. And performance analysis and experiments demonstrate that our scheme is more practical for use in small and medium size databases. Especially when a large number of files are updated at once, our scheme has advantages over some existing DSSE schemes in terms of computational efficiency and client storage overhead.
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Acknowledgements
This work was supports in part by the National Key R&D Program of China (No. 2020YFA0712300), in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 62132005 and 62172162).
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Panyu Wu is a postgraduate student in East China Normal University, China. Her research interests include information security and searchable encryption (SE).
Jiachen Shen received his Bachelor degree at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China in 2001, his Master and PhD degrees at University of Louisiana at Lafayette, USA in 2003 and 2008, respectively. He joined East China Normal University, China in 2015. His research interests include applied cryptography, cloud security, searchable encryption, and blockchains.
Zhenfu Cao is a doctoral supervisor in East China Normal University, China. His research interests include number theory, cryptography and new theories of network security (cloud computing, cloud processing security and privacy protection, big data security and privacy protection.
Xiaolei Dong received her PhD degree at Harbin Institute of Technology, China in 2001. She is a doctoral supervisor in East China Normal University, China. Her research interests include number theory, cryptography and network security (cloud computing, cloud processing security and privacy protection), big data security and privacy protection.
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Wu, P., Shen, J., Cao, Z. et al. MMKFB: multi-client and multi-keyword searchable symmetric encryption with forward and backward privacy. Front. Comput. Sci. 19, 193804 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11704-024-3390-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11704-024-3390-z