Volume Hiding Conjunctive Searchable Symmetric Encryption over Cloud
Qinghua Deng, Lanxiang Chen, Yizhao Zhu, Yi Mu · 2024
Symmetric searchable encryption (SSE) is crucial for promoting cloud storage. It enables users to encrypt private data and outsource it to untrusted servers while retaining query capabilities. To prevent the cloud from obtaining users’ private data, researchers have proposed numerous schemes to protect users' privacy. However, the issue of volume hiding has received less attention. Recent studies have demonstrated that volume leakage can be exploited to infer query keywords.To mitigate the aforementioned leakage problem, we introduce an efficient volume-hiding SSE scheme supporting conjunctive queries, denoted as VHXT. The primary strategy for implementing volume hiding comprises two aspects: first, employing a bitmap-based inverted index to obscure the query response length of the least frequent keyword, and second, introducing laconic PSI for efficient membership testing. The laconic PSI enables our scheme to achieve approximately optimal overhead. Moreover, security analysis and performance evaluation demonstrate that VHXT effectively prevents volume leakage with minimal overhead.