An Efficient Searchable Encryption Framework with Weighted Keywords for the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT)

With the increasing popularity of smart terminals, the Internet of Things (IoT) vastly expands the influence of information technology and creates great values to our society. The Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) is a typical application of the IoT specifically for medical and healthcare related purposes. In IoMT, personal health records (PHRs) generated by intelligent equipment are usually stored in a cloud sever managed by a semi-trusted cloud provider. However, there is still a possibility of the exposure of private information to unauthorized parties. In order to protect a patient’s private information, and ensure that doctors can search a patient’s PHRs without decrypting all ciphertexts, an efficient searchable encryption framework with weighted keywords is proposed in this paper. In this framework, we implement a weighted keyword model to raise the accuracy of search results, and reduce the computational and storage overhead. Besides, compared with the existing schemes, the framework is supportable of multi-search mechanism, which is adaptable to more application scenarios. Finally, the efficiency and security of this framework is proved through security and performance analysis in this paper.