Privacy-Preserving Key-Updatable Public Key Encryption with Keyword Search Supporting Ciphertext Sharing Function

Public key encryption with keyword search (PEKS) allows a user to make search on ciphertexts without disclosing the information of encrypted messages and keywords. In practice, cryptographic operations often occur on insecure devices or mobile devices. But, these devices face the risk of being lost or stolen. Therefore, the secret keys stored on these devices are likely to be exposed. To handle the key exposure problem in PEKS, the notion of key-updatable PEKS (KU-PEKS) was proposed recently. In KU-PEKS, the users' keys can be updated as the system runs. Nevertheless, the existing KU-PEKS framework has some weaknesses. Firstly, it can't update the keyword ciphertexts on the storage server without leaking keyword information. Secondly, it needs to send the search tokens to the storage server by secure channels. Thirdly, it does not consider the search token security. In this work, a new PEKS framework named key-updatable and ciphertext-sharable PEKS (KU-CS-PEKS) is devised. This novel framework effectively overcomes the weaknesses in KU-PEKS and has the ciphertext sharing function which is not supported by KU-PEKS. The security notions for KU-CS-PEKS are formally defined and then a concrete KU-CS-PEKS scheme is proposed. The security proofs demonstrate that the KU-CS-PEKS scheme guarantees both the keyword ciphertext privacy and the search token privacy. The experimental results and comparisons bear out that the proposed scheme is practicable.