Searchable encryption is a powerful tool that enables secure and private searches of encrypted data. It allows users to outsource their data to cloud servers while maintaining the confidentiality and privacy of their data. Password-authenticated symmetric searchable encryption (PASE) can help users avoid the complexity and security risks associated with key management while maintaining the advantages of searchable encryption. To the best of our knowledge, none of the existing PASE schemes can resist security threats in the post-quantum era, and there is an urgent need to design quantum-resistant solutions. However, post-quantum cryptography (e.g., lattice-based cryptography) varies significantly from traditional cryptography, and it is challenging to design a quantum-resistant PASE for cloud storage. In this work, we take the first step towards this challenge by proposing QPASE, a quantum-resistant password-authenticated symmetric searchable encryption for cloud storage. We employ lattice-based threshold oblivious pseudorandom function (TOPRF) to achieve password re-randomization and formally prove that QPASE is authentication secure and indistinguishability against chosen keyword attacks (IND-CKA) secure under quantum computers. QPASE can be extended to multi-keyword search and allows servers to update keys without affecting the users. The comparison results show that QPASE outperforms its foremost counterparts in security and computation overhead.
Searchable encryption is a powerful tool that enables secure and private searches of encrypted data. It allows users to outsource their data to cloud servers while maintaining the confidentiality and privacy of their data. Password-authenticated symmetric searchable encryption (PASE) can help users avoid the complexity and security risks associated with key management while maintaining the advantages of searchable encryption. To the best of our knowledge, none of the existing PASE schemes can resist security threats in the post-quantum era, and there is an urgent need to design quantum-resistant solutions. However, post-quantum cryptography (e.g., lattice-based cryptography) varies significantly from traditional cryptography, and it is challenging to design a quantum-resistant PASE for cloud storage. In this work, we take the first step towards this challenge by proposing QPASE, a quantum-resistant password-authenticated symmetric searchable encryption for cloud storage. We employ lattice-based threshold oblivious pseudorandom function (TOPRF) to achieve password re-randomization and formally prove that QPASE is authentication secure and indistinguishability against chosen keyword attacks (IND-CKA) secure under quantum computers. QPASE can be extended to multi-keyword search and allows servers to update keys without affecting the users. The comparison results show that QPASE outperforms its foremost counterparts in security and computation overhead.
To ensure the privacy and security of the stored data, the data can be encrypted first and then stored on the cloud. However, it faces the problem that users cannot search keywords in a large amount of data, which limits the flexibility of file sharing in the cloud environment. Searchable encryption can effectively support users to retrieve encrypted data in the cloud. Public key searchable encryption (PEKS) is used to retrieve the target encrypted data by searching specific keywords. However, the development of quantum computers has led to attacks on conventional encryption algorithms, and it is necessary to design searchable encryption schemes that can resist quantum attacks. Therefore, we propose a lattice puncturable PEKS scheme. Besides resisting quantum attacks, the proposed scheme attains efficient and flexible user revocation. Firstly, identity-based encryption is employed to minimize the complexity of key management. Secondly, the puncturable encryption technology is integrated into the proposed encryption to revoke the decryption capability for selected messages, enabling authorized recipients to repeatedly update their decryption keys to retrieve the currently encrypted messages. Finally, we prove the security of our scheme under the indistinguishability against chosen keyword attack (IND-PUN-sID-CKA), and conduct a comparison with other schemes to emphasize its advantages. Although the scheme does not have an edge in size, it holds an advantage in key update after adding the puncture function and also realizes higher security.
Searchable encryption enables efficient retrieval of encrypted data stored in cloud environments while preserving data confidentiality. Within this context, Public Key Encryption with Keyword Search (PEKS) allows data users to perform keyword-based searches using their public-private key pairs. However, traditional PEKS schemes remain vulnerable to Inside Keyword Guessing Attacks (IKGA), which led to the introduction of the Public-Key Authenticated Encryption with Keyword Search (PAEKS) paradigm to enhance resilience against insider threats. Despite this advancement, most existing PAEKS schemes rely on number-theoretic assumptions, such as the discrete logarithm problem, thereby becoming insecure in the presence of against quantum adversaries. Consequently, recent research has focused on developing quantum-resistant, lattice-based PAEKS schemes. Although schemes based on the Learning with Errors (LWE) problem provide strong post-quantum security, they often incur high computational and communication costs, limiting their practicality in large-scale cloud environments. To overcome these limitations, this work presents an efficient and verifiable PAEKS scheme based on the Middle-Product LWE (MP-LWE) problem, which preserves the underlying security guarantees while significantly improving performance. Formal security analysis demonstrates resistance against Chosen Keyword Attack (CKA) and IKGA in the random oracle (RO) model. Experimental results confirm that the proposed scheme achieves substantially lower computational and communication overheads compared to existing schemes, while maintaining robust post-quantum security.
With the improvement of awareness of data privacy, the user's sensitive data are usually encrypted before uploading them to cloud. Searchable encryption is a critical technique on promoting secure and efficient cloud storage. In particular, publickey encryption with keyword search (PEKS) provides an elegant approach to achieve data retrieval in encrypted storage. All existing searchable publickey encryption schemes only provide the security based on classical cryptography hardness assumption. With the development of quantum computers, these schemes will be insecure. Based on the lattice hardness assumptions, we propose a new searchable publickey encryption scheme with a designated tester (dPEKS). Our scheme has advantages: First, our scheme is the first searchable publickey encryption scheme that is considered to be secure even if quantum computers are ever developed. Second, our scheme achieves the trapdoor indistinguishability. The trapdoor indistinguishability implies the security against outside offline keyword guessing attacks (KGAs). Last, our scheme can achieve the trapdoor anonymity for server.
With the improvement of awareness of data privacy, the user's sensitive data are usually encrypted before uploading them to cloud. Searchable encryption is a critical technique on promoting secure and efficient cloud storage. In particular, publickey encryption with keyword search (PEKS) provides an elegant approach to achieve data retrieval in encrypted storage. All existing searchable publickey encryption schemes only provide the security based on classical cryptography hardness assumption. With the development of quantum computers, these schemes will be insecure. Based on the lattice hardness assumptions, we propose a new searchable publickey encryption scheme with a designated tester (dPEKS). Our scheme has advantages: First, our scheme is the first searchable publickey encryption scheme that is considered to be secure even if quantum computers are ever developed. Second, our scheme achieves the trapdoor indistinguishability. The trapdoor indistinguishability implies the security against outside offline keyword guessing attacks (KGAs). Last, our scheme can achieve the trapdoor anonymity for server.
Abstract. When data is outsourced to a remote storage server, search-able encryption plays an important role to protect data privacy while allowing users to retrieve data in the massive ciphertext. As far as we know, most of the existing searchable encryption schemes work based on the bilinear map. These schemes may not be secure in the quantum age. Both discrete logarithms and factorization can be solved by quantum computer in a polynomial time. There is very few searchable encryption scheme that can be proved secure in post quantum age. In this paper, in order to construct a post-quantum secure scheme for future cloud stor-age, we suggest a public key encryption with semantic keyword search using the lattice based mechanism. The suggested scheme is proved se-cure against indistinguishable chosen-keyword attacks (IND-CKA) based on learning with errors (LWE) problem. This scheme is believed to be secure in quantum-era due to the quantum intractability of the LWE problem.
Since the convenience and advancement of cloud applications, many users (e.g., companies or individuals) adopt remote cloud services to reduce the local storage overload and computing consumption. However, before transferring them to the cloud server, users always encrypt outsourced data for the privacy of important data, which deprives flexible usage of these data. Public key encryption with keyword search (PEKS) undoubtedly offers a precise resolution to this issue. Unfortunately, most PEKS schemes cannot fight against quantum computing attackers, which is increasingly a research hotspot. To achieve postquantum security and privacy-preserving search function, we propose a quantum-resistant PEKS scheme named IsoqurPEKS. Our proposed instantiation satisfies basic semantic security indistinguishable against chosen keyword attack (IND-CKA), and IsoqurPEKS is proved to be secure under the security model. Furthermore, we compare IsoqurPEKS with the other eight current PEKS schemes with respect to security properties, communication, and computation costs. The comparison results indicate that the proposed scheme has the best security and performance among the nine PEKS schemes.