Privacy-preserving conjunctive keyword search on encrypted data with enhanced fine-grained access control

Cloud storage over the internet gives opportunities for easy data sharing. To preserve the privacy of sharing data, the outsourced data is usually encrypted. The searchable encryption technique provides a solution to find the target data in the encrypted form. And the public-key encryption with keyword search is regarded as a major approach for the searchable encryption technique. However, there are still several privacy leakage challenges for the further adoption of these major schemes. One is how to resist the keyword guessing attack which still leaks data user’s keywords privacy. Another is how to construct the access control policy to prevent illegal access of outsourced data sharing since illegal access always leak the privacy of user’s attribute. In our paper, we firstly try to design a novel secure keyword index to resist the keyword guessing attack from access pattern and search pattern. Second, we propose an attribute-based encryption scheme which supports an enhanced fine-grained access control search. This allows the authenticated users to access different data although their searching request contains the same queried keywords, and meanwhile unauthenticated users cannot get any attribute privacy information. Third, we give security proofs to show that the construction of keyword index is against keyword guessing attack from the access pattern and search pattern, and our scheme is proved to be IND-CPA secure (the indistinguishability under chosen plaintext attack) under the standard model. Finally, theoretical analyses and a series of experiments are conducted to demonstrate the efficiency of our scheme.