R&D: Multi-User Dynamic Symmetric Searchable Encryption for Attribute-Value Type Database in Cloud Storage

Communications in Computer and Information Science book series (CCIS, volume 1268) has published, in International Conference on Security and Privacy in Digital Economy (SPDE 2020) proceedings, an article written by Shanshan Li, Chunxiang Xu, Yuan Zhang, Xinsheng Wen, School of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, China.

Abstract: “Cloud storage services allow a data owner to share their data with each other as a group. Typically, the data owner outsources files to the cloud server, and some authorized users can access and edit the files subsequently. In reality, the most widely-used format of files in such a cloud-based collaboration system is attribute-value type one, e.g., an excel spreadsheet, where each file corresponds to an item and multiple attribute values. Each attribute value can be considered as a keyword, and a type of attribute values “describes” an attribute. The database generated by such files is called the attribute-value type database. Authorized users can search outsourced files by either keywords or attributes such that they can access the files flexibly. However, due to the sensitivity of the outsourced files, the data owner always encrypts the file before outsourcing, which precludes users from searching target files. This problem could be mitigated by utilizing DSSE, but it only supports searching over ciphertexts by keywords, and thereby is unsatisfactory for the attribute-value database. Furthermore, DSSE schemes built on a single-user setting are out of alignment with the practical applications. In this paper, we propose a multi-user DSSE scheme for attribute-value type database based on blind storage, dubbed MDSSE, such that authorized users can search over files by either keywords or attributes, while the confidentiality of the files is ensured. We analyze MDSSE in terms of security and efficiency, which proves that MDSSE is secure against various attacks with high efficiency in terms of communication and computation costs.“