Lattice-based searchable encryption scheme against inside keywords guessing attack

To save the local storage, users store the data on the cloud server who offers convenient internet services. To guarantee the data privacy, users encrypt the data before uploading them into the cloud server. Since encryption can reduce the data availability, public-key encryption with keyword search (PEKS) is developed to achieve the retrieval of the encrypted data without decrypting them. However, most PEKS schemes cannot resist quantum computing attack, because the corresponding hardness assumptions are some number theory problems that can be solved efficiently under quantum computers. Besides, the traditional PEKS schemes have an inherent security issue that they cannot resist inside keywords guessing attack (KGA). In this attack, a malicious server can guess the keywords encapsulated in the search token by computing the ciphertext of keywords exhaustively and performing the test between the token and the ciphertext of keywords. In the paper, we propose a lattice-based PEKS scheme that can resist quantum computing attacks. To resist inside KGA, this scheme adopts a lattice-based signature technique into the encryption of keywords to prevent the malicious server from forging a valid ciphertext. Finally, some simulation experiments are conducted to demonstrate the performance of the proposed scheme and some comparison results are further shown with respect to other searchable schemes. © 2020 Tech Science Press. All rights reserved.