AKSER: Attribute-based keyword search with efficient revocation in cloud computing

Abstract With the advent of cloud computing, it is becoming increasingly popular for data owners to outsource their data to public cloud servers while allowing indented data users to retrieve these data stored in the cloud. For security and privacy reasons, data owners usually encrypt their data prior to outsourcing to the cloud server. At the same time, users often need to find data related to specific keywords of interest, this motivates research on the searchable encryption technique. In this paper, we focus on a different, yet more challenging, scenario where the outsourced dataset can have contribution from multiple owners and are searchable by multiple users. Based on our research of attribute-based encryption (ABE), we propose an attribute-based keyword search with efficient revocation scheme (AKSER). Our scheme is highly efficient in terms of user revocation and can achieve fine-grained authorization of the search under the distributed multiple-attribute authorized institution. Security analysis demonstrates that the proposed scheme AKSER can achieve keyword semantic security, keyword secrecy, trapdoor unlinkability, and collusion resistance.