Partially Hidden Policy Attribute-Based Multi-Keyword Searchable Encryption With Verification and Revocation
Liqing Chen, Shiguo Xu, Chunhua Jin, Hao Zhang, Jian Weng · IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing · 2025
Data security is becoming increasingly critical as outsourced data services flourish. An effective solution for ensuring data confidentiality in the cloud is attribute-based searchable encryption (ABSE). However, most extant ABSE solutions have not been able to simultaneously achieve rich expressive queries, result validation, attribute revocation, and policy hiding, and there are problems such as inflexibility in query methods and access control capabilities, insufficient scalability and practicality, and privacy leakage. In particular, it should be noted that most ABSE schemes fail to promise the privacy security of access policies and are susceptible to offline keyword guessing attack. Hidden policy-ABSE (HP-ABSE) has been proposed to tackle the issue of explicit attribute values in access policies potentially compromising privacy. Nevertheless, in most existing HP-ABSE schemes, an adversary may initiate attribute values guessing attack to speculate on the values of attribute within access strategy. To this end, this paper proposes partially hidden policy attribute-based multi-keyword searchable encryption with verification and revocation (PHP-ABMKSE-VR). PHP-ABMKSE-VR scheme is practical, secure, as well as effective, making it appropriate for real-world scenarios like smart healthcare, as demonstrated by the experimental outcomes and safety analysis.