Enabling Public Verifiable Keyword Search over Encrypted Cloud Data Using Consortium Blockchain

With the rapid expansion of cloud computing, the necessity for secure and efficient data sharing over the cloud has become more critical. Searchable Encryption (SE) technology plays a key role by enabling data owners to store encrypted data on the cloud while still permitting users to perform search operations. However, existing SE schemes encounter difficulties in maintaining a balance between ensuring data privacy, verifiability, and efficiency. To overcome these limitations, we propose OathSeek, a blockchain-based SE scheme that achieves all the above requirements. By maintaining version authentication tag, our approach significantly reduces the update overhead. Additionally, by leveraging blockchain technology, our scheme supports public verification of search results. We conducted a rigorous security analysis of the scheme and evaluated its efficiency through experiments. The experimental results demonstrate that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) schemes by approximately 3×.