Enabling Verifiable Keyword Search Over Encrypted Data via Dynamic Version-Aware Indexing

As data sharing on networked infrastructures becomes more common, the need to securely manage information between nodes is increasingly critical. Searchable Encryption (SE) is a common primitive for cloud data sharing, which enables the data owner to store the encrypted data set in the cloud for users to search. However, existing SE schemes face challenge among verifiability, privacy and efficiency. To overcome this limitation, we propose an efficient and verifiable SE scheme EchoSeek. In our approach, we design a novel version-binding-based verification scheme to deal with the version change of the encrypted dataset. Our scheme ensures verifiability, privacy, and efficiency, and users are not required to maintain any auxiliary information. We tailor our scheme for both non-forward privacy and forward privacy scenarios, namely EchoSeek-N and EchoSeek-F, respectively. We formally prove the security of our scheme, and conduct theoretical and experimental evaluation to prove its effectiveness.