Verifiable dynamic searchable encryption

Abstract

Using regular encryption schemes to protect the privacy of the outsourced data implies that the client should sacrifice functionality for security. Searchable symmetric encryption (SSE) schemes encrypt the data in a way that the client can later search and selectively retrieve the required data. Many SSE schemes have been proposed, starting with static constructions, and then dynamic and adaptively secure constructions but usually in the honest-but-curious model. We propose a verifiable dynamic SSE scheme that is adaptively secure against malicious adversaries. Our scheme supports file modification, which is essential for efficiently working with large files, in addition to the ability to add/delete files. While our main construction is proven secure in the random oracle model (ROM), we also present a solution secure in the standard model with full security proof. Our experiments show that our scheme in the ROM performs a search within a few milliseconds, verifies the result in another few milliseconds, and has a proof overhead of 0.01% only. Our standard model solution, while being asymptotically slower, is still practical, requiring only a small client memory (e.g., ≃488 KB) even for a large file collection (e.g., ≃10 GB), and necessitates small tokens (e.g., ≃156 KB for search and ≃362 KB for file operations).