R&D: Message-Locked Searchable Encryption, New Versatile Tool for Secure Cloud Storage

IEEE Transactions on Services Computing has published an article written by Xueqiao Liu, Guomin Yang, School of Computer Science and Software Engineering, University of Wollongong, Wollongong, New South Wales Australia,  Willy Susilo, Joseph Tonien, School of Computing and IT, U. Wollongong, Wollongong, New South Wales Australia, Rongmao Chen, College of Computer, National University of Defense Technology, 58294 Changsha, Hunan China 410073, and  Lv Xixiang, none, National key lab of ISN, Xidian University, Xian, Shaanxi China 710071.

Abstract: “Message-Locked Encryption (MLE) is a useful tool to enable deduplication over encrypted data in cloud storage. It can significantly improve the cloud service quality by eliminating redundancy to save storage resources, and hence user cost, and also providing defense against different types of attacks, such as duplicate faking attack and brute-force attack. A typical MLE scheme only focuses on deduplication. On the other hand, supporting search operations on stored content is another essential requirement for cloud storage. In this paper, we present a message-locked searchable encryption (MLSE) scheme in a dual-server setting, which achieves simultaneously the desirable features of supporting deduplication and enabling users to perform search operations over encrypted data. In addition, it supports both multi-keyword and negative keyword searches. We formulate the security notions of MLSE and prove our scheme satisfies all the security requirements. Moreover, we provide an interesting extension of our construction to support Proof of Storage (PoS). Compared with the existing solutions, MLSE achieves better functionalities and efficiency, and hence enables more versatile and efficient cloud storage service.“