KeySea: Keyword-Based Search With Receiver Anonymity in Attribute-Based Searchable Encryption

In modern digital age, enterprise applications typically outsource user data in pubic cloud storage with the objective of availing flexibility and scalability features of cloud infrastructure, and importantly, making business goal more cost effective. Security and privacy concerns pose a challenging task to handle in cloud setup by both service providers and service consumers. In this landscape, before outsourcing the sensitive data on cloud storage, the data should be protected from unauthorized access and the privacy of the users should be preserved as per application requirement. In this article, we present a scheme, termed as KeySea, keyword-based search over attribute-based encrypted data with receiver anonymity. While searching documents pertaining to the target keyword(s), keeping receiver’s anonymity and ensuring data privacy are important features in applications like healthcare, bureaucracy, social engineering, and so on. The construction of the KeySea scheme uses the hidden access policy in attribute-based searchable encryption. The KeySea scheme provides a secure and practical solution to address the issue of privacy-preserving search over encrypted data in the public cloud storage. We show the security strengths of the KeySea scheme and its practicality with experimental results.