International Association for Cryptologic Research

International Association
for Cryptologic Research

IACR News item: 02 August 2013

Qingji Zheng, Shouhuai Xu, Giuseppe Ateniese
ePrint Report ePrint Report
It is quite common nowadays for data owners to outsource their data to the cloud.

However, since the cloud is not fully trusted, the outsourced data should be encrypted, which brings a range of problems, such as: How can authorized data users search over a data owner\'s outsourced encrypted data?

How should a data owner grant search capabilities to data users?

How can data users be assured that the cloud faithfully executed the search operations? Towards ultimately addressing these problems, in this paper we propose a novel cryptographic scheme, called {\\em verifiable attribute-based keyword search} (\\vabks). This scheme

allows a data user, whose attributes or credentials satisfy a data owner\'s access control policy,

to (i) search over the data owner\'s outsourced encrypted data,

(ii) outsource the tedious search operations to the cloud, and

(iii) verify whether the cloud has faithfully executed the search operations.

We define \\vabks\'s security properties, and present concrete constructions that are proven to possess these properties. Performance evaluation shows that the proposed schemes are practical.

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