Secure Fine-Grained Encrypted Keyword Search for Internet of Things
Peng Wang, Hui Wang, Fei Ouyang, Yikang Yang · 2025
With the rapid proliferation of smart devices, an unprecedented volume of sensitive data is being collected and stored in cloud servers. For privacy reasons, this data must remain inaccessible to unauthorized parties, and cloud providers can also not derive any information from the stored sensitive data. To address these challenges, attribute-based public key searchable encryption (ABSE) technology enables secure retrieval and fine-grained access control over encrypted data. Nevertheless, most existing ABSE schemes lack flexibility and efficiency, which limits their practical applications. In this paper, we present a secure and efficient fine-grained encrypted keyword search scheme for the Internet of Things, named SPEKS. Our scheme leverages subset predicate encryption to achieve highly adaptable and flexible access control policies in multi-user environments. The security analysis demonstrates that SPEKS is secure against chosen keyword attacks. Additionally, by contrasting with other related schemes, it is evident that our proposed scheme offers flexible access control while reducing computation and communication costs.