Towards Public Verifiable and Forward-Privacy Encrypted Search by Using Blockchain
IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure ComputingPublished 1 January 2022
Yu Guo, Chen Zhang, Cong Wang, Xiaohua Jia
Citations253
SJR quartileQ1
SJR score1.75
SNIP2.55
Generate an AI Snapshot to get a quick, structured summary of this paper.
Study Snapshot
ObjectiveStudy objective
MethodsResearch methodology
PopulationPopulation studied
Sample sizeSample sizes
OutcomesStudy outcomes here
ResultsStudy results comes here
LimitationsResearch study limitations comes here
A concise AI-generated summary of the paper will appear here once you click Generate AI Snapshot.
TL;DR
This paper resorts to the emerging smart contract as a trusted platform to store digests for public result verification, and carefully crafts dynamic query protocols to enable encrypted search with forward-privacy in a blockchain-assisted DSSE scheme.
Abstract
Dynamic Searchable Symmetric Encryption (DSSE) is a practical cryptographic primitive that assists servers to provide search and update functionalities in the ciphertext domain. Recent work on DSSE schemes has focused on the direction of forward-privacy, requiring that newly added files cannot be linked to previously query results. However, due to the complexity of forward-privacy updates, existing schemes can only address an honest-but-curious server. It is difficult to verify updated results while preserving forward-privacy. In this paper, we explore how blockchain techniques can help us achieve a verifiable and forward-privacy DSSE scheme. Our scheme resorts to the emerging smart contract as a trusted platform to store digests for public result verification, and carefully crafts dynamic query protocols to enable encrypted search with forward-privacy. In our design, indexes are collocated with encrypted files and stored at storage-servers, which makes the blockchain light-weighted and search operations more efficient. Moreover, we propose a hybrid index design to support efficient files deletion. By using our blockchain-assisted primitive, the property collision between dynamic result verification and forward-privacy can be solved. We formally analyze the security strengths and provide the prototype implementation on Ethereum. Experiment results demonstrate the feasibility and usability of our blockchain-assisted DSSE scheme.
Keywords
Computer Science
Practical techniques for searches on encrypted data
3,348 Citations2002Dawn Xiaoding Song, David Wagner +1 more
This work describes the cryptographic schemes for the problem of searching on encrypted data and provides proofs of security for the resulting crypto systems, and presents simple, fast, and practical algorithms that are practical to use today.
Searchable symmetric encryption
1,615 Citations2006Reza Curtmola, Juan A. Garay +2 more
This paper formally defines SSE in the multi-user setting, and presents an efficient construction that achieves better performance than simply using access control mechanisms.
Dynamic searchable symmetric encryption
1,081 Citations2012Seny Kamara, Charalampos Papamanthou +1 more
This work proposes the first SSE scheme to satisfy all the properties of searchable symmetric encryption and extends the inverted index approach in several non-trivial ways and introduces new techniques for the design of SSE.
Lecture notes in computer sciencePrivacy Preserving Keyword Searches on Remote Encrypted Data
1,041 Citations2005Yan-Cheng Chang, Michael Mitzenmacher
This paper offers solutions for the problem of efficiently retrieving some of the encrypted files containing (or indexed by) specific keywords, keeping the keywords themselves secret and not jeopardizing the security of the remotely stored files.
Dynamic Searchable Encryption in Very-Large Databases: Data Structures and Implementation
665 Citations2014David M. Cash, Joseph Jaeger +5 more
This work designs and implements dynamic symmetric searchable encryption schemes that efficiently and privately search server-held encrypted databases with tens of billions of record-keyword pairs and reports on an implementation that uses the dynamic SSE schemes developed here as the basis for supporting recent SSE advances, including complex search queries and richer operational settings.
Practical Dynamic Searchable Encryption with Small Leakage
584 Citations2014Emil Stefanov, Charalampos Papamanthou +1 more
This paper proposes the first DSSE scheme that achieves the best of both worlds, i.e., both small leakage and efficiency, and provides an implementation of the scheme, showing its practical efficiency.
Leakage-Abuse Attacks Against Searchable Encryption
578 Citations2015David M. Cash, Paul Grubbs +2 more
This work empirically investigates the security of searchable encryption by providing query recovery and plaintext recovery attacks that exploit these leakage profiles, and presents attack models based on an adversarial server's prior knowledge.
Lecture notes in computer scienceParallel and Dynamic Searchable Symmetric Encryption
525 Citations2013Seny Kamara, Charalampos Papamanthou
A new method for constructing sub-linear SSE schemes that enjoys a strong notion of security, namely security against adaptive chosen-keyword attacks, and can be implemented efficiently in external memory with logarithmic I/O overhead.
Lecture notes in computer scienceStructured Encryption and Controlled Disclosure
501 Citations2010Melissa Chase, Seny Kamara
The notion of structured encryption is introduced which generalizes previous work on symmetric searchable encryption (SSE) to the setting of arbitrarily-structured data.
Inference Attacks on Property-Preserving Encrypted Databases
479 Citations2015Muhammad Naveed, Seny Kamara +1 more
This paper presents a series of attacks that recover the plaintext from DTE- and OPE-encrypted database columns using only the encrypted column and publicly-available auxiliary information, and considers well-known attacks, including frequency analysis and sorting, as well as new attacks based on combinatorial optimization.
Forward and Backward Private Searchable Encryption from Constrained Cryptographic Primitives
408 Citations2017Raphaël Bost, Brice Minaud +1 more
This paper study for the first time the notion of backward privacy for searchable encryption, and presents several schemes achieving both forward and backward privacy, with various efficiency trade-offs.
Searching an Encrypted Cloud Meets Blockchain: A Decentralized, Reliable and Fair Realization
252 Citations2018Shengshan Hu, Chengjun Cai +4 more
This work replaces the central server with a carefully-designed smart contract and constructs a decentralized privacy-preserving search scheme where the data owner can receive correct search results with assurance and without worrying about potential wrongdoings of a malicious server.
<i>Notice of Removal February 26, 2026:</i> New Constructions for Forward and Backward Private Symmetric Searchable Encryption
226 Citations2018Javad Ghareh Chamani, Dimitrios Papadopoulos +2 more
The first scheme achieves Type-II backward privacy and the experimental evaluation shows it has 145-253X faster search computation times than previous constructions with the same leakage, which makes it the most efficient implementation of a forward and backward private scheme so far.
vChain
211 Citations2019Cheng Xu, Ce Zhang +1 more
This paper proposes a novel framework, called vChain, that alleviates the storage and computing costs of the user and employs verifiable queries to guarantee the results' integrity and proposes an accumulator-based authenticated data structure that enables dynamic aggregation over arbitrary query attributes.
IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure ComputingSearchable Symmetric Encryption with Forward Search Privacy
202 Citations2019Jin Li, Yanyu Huang +5 more
The hidden pointer technique is developed and a new SSE scheme called Khons is proposed, which satisfies the security notion (with the original forward privacy notion) and is also efficient and implemented and results show that it is more efficient than existing SSE schemes with forward privacy.
Searchable Encryption with Secure and Efficient Updates
183 Citations2014Florian Hahn, Florian Kerschbaum
This paper presents the first searchable encryption scheme whose updates leak no more information than the access pattern, that still has asymptotically optimal search time, linear, very small and asymptonically optimal index size and can be implemented without storage on the client (except the key).
Information SciencesBlockchain-based fair payment smart contract for public cloud storage auditing
159 Citations2020Hao Wang, Hong Qin +4 more
To reduce the number of interactions in the execution of contract, the notion of non-interactive public provable data possession is presented and a blockchain-based smart contract for public cloud storage auditing based on this primitive is designed.
Forward Secure Dynamic Searchable Symmetric Encryption with Efficient Updates
159 Citations2017Kee Sung Kim, Minkyu Kim +3 more
This paper designs and implements a forward secure DSSE scheme with optimal search and update complexity, and proposes a new, simple, theoretical data structure, called dual dictionary, which allows to delete data explicitly and in real time, which greatly improves efficiency compared to previous works.
IEEE Transactions on Services ComputingMedShare: A Privacy-Preserving Medical Data Sharing System by Using Blockchain
145 Citations2021Mingyue Wang, Yu Guo +4 more
This article proposes MedShare, a decentralized framework for secure EHR sharing that utilizes the smart contract technique of blockchain to establish a trusted platform for healthcare centers to share their encrypted EHR, and devise a constant-size attribute-based encryption (ABE) scheme.
GEM^2-Tree: A Gas-Efficient Structure for Authenticated Range Queries in Blockchain
125 Citations2019Ce Zhang, Cheng Xu +3 more
A novel ADS, called GEM^2-tree, is proposed, which is not only gas-efficient but also effective in supporting authenticated queries in the hybrid-storage blockchain, in which a unique gas cost model is employed.
IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure ComputingA Blockchain-Based Self-Tallying Voting Protocol in Decentralized IoT
116 Citations2020Yannan Li, Willy Susilo +5 more
A framework of the self-tallying voting system in decentralized IoT based on blockchain is introduced and it is proved that the proposed system satisfies all the security requirements, including fairness, dispute-freeness, and maximal ballot secrecy.
IEEE NetworkToward Privacy and Regulation in Blockchain-Based Cryptocurrencies
114 Citations2019Yannan Li, Willy Susilo +5 more
The privacy issues in Bitcoin are analyzed and some existing privacy-enhancing techniques in blockchain- based cryptocurrencies as well as some privacy-focused altcoins are investigated, and two possible solutions from a top view to balance privacy and regulation of blockchain-based cryptocurrencies are proposed.
IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure ComputingEnabling Reliable Keyword Search in Encrypted Decentralized Storage with Fairness
114 Citations2018Chengjun Cai, Jian Weng +2 more
This work utilizes the smart contract to record the logs of encrypted search (aka evidence) on the blockchain, and devise a fair protocol to handle disputes and issue fair payments, and craft a concrete scheme that preserves encrypted search capability and enforces ecosystem healthiness.
DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals)Efficient Dynamic Searchable Encryption with Forward Privacy
113 Citations2018Mohammad Etemad, Alptekın Küpçü +2 more
A new dynamic SSE scheme that achieves forward privacy by replacing the keys revealed to the server on each search is presented, which is efficient and parallelizable and outperforms the best previous schemes providing forward privacy.
FalconDB: Blockchain-based Collaborative Database
110 Citations2020Yanqing Peng, Min Du +3 more
This paper presents FalconDB, which enables different parties with limited hardware resources to efficiently and securely collaborate on a database with high efficiency, low storage cost and blockchain-level security guarantees.
Future Generation Computer SystemsSearchain: Blockchain-based private keyword search in decentralized storage
110 Citations2017Peng Jiang, Fuchun Guo +3 more
Searchain is introduced, a blockchain-based keyword search system that enables oblivious search over an authorized keyword set in the decentralized storage, built on top of a novel primitive called oblivious keyword search with authorization (OKSA), which provides the guarantee of keyword authorization besides oblivious search.
Lecture notes in computer scienceIncremental Multiset Hash Functions and Their Application to Memory Integrity Checking
109 Citations2003Dwaine Clarke, Srinivas Devadas +3 more
This work introduces a new cryptographic tool: multiset hash functions, which map multisets of arbitrary finite size to strings (hashes) of fixed length.
IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed SystemsVQL: Efficient and Verifiable Cloud Query Services for Blockchain Systems
105 Citations2021Haotian Wu, Zhe Peng +3 more
A Verifiable Query Layer (VQL) that can be deployed in the cloud to provide both efficient and verifiable data query services for blockchain systems and guarantee the authenticity of query results for Blockchain systems is proposed.
IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed SystemsEnabling Generic, Verifiable, and Secure Data Search in Cloud Services
102 Citations2018Jie Zhu, Qi Li +4 more
GSSE is proposed, the first generic verifiable SSE scheme in the single-owner multiple-user model, which provides verifiability for any SSE schemes and further supports data updates and develops a timestamp-chain for data freshness maintenance across multiple users.
IEEE Internet of Things JournalBlockchain-Based Dynamic Provable Data Possession for Smart Cities
96 Citations2020Ruonan Chen, Yannan Li +4 more
This article describes a blockchain-based PDP model to realize the decentralized outsourcing storage framework, and presents a concrete construction of decentralized PDP by using multireplica storage tricks.
Authenticated Keyword Search in Scalable Hybrid-Storage Blockchains
81 Citations2021Ce Zhang, Cheng Xu +3 more
This paper proposes the Suppressed Merkle inverted (Merkle Inv) index, which maintains only a partial ADS structure on-chain that can be securely updated with a logarithm-sized cryptographic proof, and proposes a Chameleon inverted (Chameleoninv) index that leverages the chameleon vector commitment to achieve a constant maintenance cost.
IEEE Transactions on Services ComputingFedCrowd: A Federated and Privacy-Preserving Crowdsourcing Platform on Blockchain
76 Citations2020Yu Guo, Hongcheng Xie +3 more
FedCrowd is proposed and implemented, the first federated and privacy-preserving crowdsourcing platform by using blockchain technology, to employ the smart contract as a trusted platform for systems to release encrypted tasks, and carefully craft matching protocols to enable efficient task recommendations in the ciphertext domain.
IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure ComputingProxy-Free Privacy-Preserving Task Matching with Efficient Revocation in Crowdsourcing
68 Citations2018Jiangang Shu, Kan Yang +4 more
This paper proposes a proxy-free task matching scheme for multi-requester/multi-worker crowdsourcing, which achieves task-worker matching over encrypted data with scalability and non-interaction and designs two different mechanisms for worker revocation including Server-Local Revocation and Global Revocation, which realize efficient worker revocation with minimal overhead.
Forward and Backward Private Searchable Encryption with SGX
57 Citations2019Ghous Amjad, Seny Kamara +1 more
This work proposes the first SGX-supported dynamic SSE constructions that are forward-private as well as backward-private, and shows that there is no need for 'total obliviousness' in constructions for the strongest notion of backward privacy.
Verifiable and Forward-secure Encrypted Search Using Blockchain Techniques
50 Citations2020Yu Guo, Chen Zhang +1 more
This work proposes a new dynamic SSE scheme based on blockchain techniques, and applies it as the underlying building blocks to preserve forward-secure updates and resorts to the emerging smart contract technique to customize a verification scheme, making updated results easily verifiable.
IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data EngineeringAuthenticating Aggregate Queries over Set-Valued Data with Confidentiality
47 Citations2017Cheng Xu, Qian Chen +3 more
This paper proposes authenticated aggregate queries over set-valued data that not only ensure the integrity of query results but also preserve the confidentiality of source data and develops a family of privacy-preserving authentication protocols for primitive multiset operations.
IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed SystemsEnabling Encrypted Rich Queries in Distributed Key-Value Stores
47 Citations2018Yu Guo, Xingliang Yuan +4 more
EncKV is an encrypted and distributed key-value store with rich query support, equipped with an enhanced ORE scheme with reduced leakage, and enables secure system scaling in a minimally intrusive way.
HybrIDX: New Hybrid Index for Volume-hiding Range Queries in Data Outsourcing Services
36 Citations2020Kui Ren, Yu Guo +7 more
This paper defines and solves the challenging problem of volume-hiding range queries over encrypted data, and proposes a novel hybrid index framework, called HybrIDX, that allows an untrusted server to efficiently search encrypted data based on order conditions without revealing the exact volume size.
IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure ComputingEnabling Privacy-Preserving Geographic Range Query in Fog-Enhanced IoT Services
33 Citations2021Yu Guo, Hongcheng Xie +2 more
A new geographic range-match scheme for fog-enhanced services is devised, which allows fog-nodes to securely collect range-based sensed data while protecting the location privacy of IoT devices.
IEEE Transactions on Services ComputingUnderstanding Mobile Users’ Privacy Expectations: A Recommendation-Based Method Through Crowdsourcing
22 Citations2016Rui Liu, Junbin Liang +5 more
PriWe leverages the crowdsourced permission settings to understand users’ privacy expectations and provides app specific recommendations to mitigate information leakage, thereby help them to mitigate privacy disclosure in smartphones.
Vassago: Efficient and Authenticated Provenance Query on Multiple Blockchains
20 Citations2021Rui Han, Jiang Xiao +5 more
Vassago is presented, the first multi-chain system that empowers efficient and authenticated provenance queries and incorporates three innovative designs: it explores the dependencies of cross-chain transactions, it validates the authenticity ofCross-chain provenance by recording and querying the dependencies on a shared blockchain, and it improves efficiency by parallelizing query processes.
IEEE Internet of Things JournalPrivacy-Preserving Packet Header Checking Over in-the-Cloud Middleboxes
19 Citations2020Yu Guo, Mingyue Wang +3 more
This article proposes two new encrypted header-matching schemes that significantly improve security and efficiency and carefully craft security designs to enable efficient header inspection in the ciphertext domain.
EncELC: Hardening and Enriching Ethereum Light Clients with Trusted Enclaves
16 Citations2020Chengjun Cai, Lei Xu +4 more
EncELC is proposed, a new Ethereum light client design that enforces full-fledged protections for clients and enables rich queries over the Ethereum blockchain and leverages trusted hardware (e.g., Intel SGX) as a starting point for building efficient yet secure processing.
The Computer JournalA Verifiable Symmetric Searchable Encryption Scheme Based on the AVL Tree
15 Citations2021Qing Wang, Xi Zhang +3 more
A verifiable symmetric searchable encryption scheme based on the AVL Tree (abbreviated as VSSE-AVL), which uses complete keyword labels to build the index and which performs better on storage, search and verification.
SoK: A Systematic Study of Attacks in Efficient Encrypted Cloud Data Search
14 Citations2020Jing Yao, Yifeng Zheng +2 more
A systematic survey on the recent advances on attacks in efficient encrypted cloud data search backed by SSE or OPE/ORE is provided and a categorization of the adversary model from diverse dimensions is provided.
Lecture notes in computer scienceAccelerating Forward and Backward Private Searchable Encryption Using Trusted Execution
3 Citations2020Viet Vo, Shangqi Lai +4 more
A hardware-assisted solution to take over the most tasks of the client, i.e., tracking keyword states along with data addition and caching deleted data, and develops batch data processing and state compression technique to reduce the communication overhead between the SGX and untrusted server, and minimise the memory footprint in the enclave.