Lightweight multi-client order-revealing encryption with limited leakage
Chunyang Lv, Jianfeng Wang, Shi-Feng Sun, Saiyu Qi, Chao Chen, Leo Yu Zhang, Kok‐Leong Ong · Information Sciences · 2026
Order-revealing encryption (ORE) facilitates the secure ordering of encrypted data, enabling its application in non-interactive encrypted range queries. Recent advancements in this area have concentrated on developing secure and practical schemes, including support for cross-user queries. Nevertheless, schemes that offer enhanced security often depend on computationally intensive public-key operations, whereas more practical alternatives frequently compromise security by leaking substantial information, such as the relative distances between ciphertexts. In multi-user scenarios, the challenges are further compounded by increased structural complexity.In response to these challenges, we propose a secure, multi-client ORE scheme, designated as lightweight m-ORE, which exhibits superior performance. Our scheme is distinguished by its reliance solely on simple symmetric primitives while still delivering robust security guarantees. Additionally, it operates securely in multi-client environments through the implementation of a key-splitting technique, under the assumption that entities are honest but curious.Moreover, we extend this scheme to develop an encrypted cross-user multi-dimensional range query system, thereby demonstrating its practical utility. Comprehensive implementation under various parameter settings, coupled with comparisons to previous work, reveals that our scheme achieves a more than 300-fold speedup in encryption processes and multiple orders of magnitude improvement in comparison algorithms, relative to state-of-the-art multi-client ORE schemes.