Enabling Multi-Client Authorization in Dynamic SSE
This addresses the scalability and privacy issues in searchable encryption for cloud deployments, allowing multiple clients with different authorization levels to securely search encrypted data, though it builds incrementally on the OXT framework.
The paper tackles the problem of enabling secure, multi-client search over encrypted data with fine-grained access control, proposing MASSE, a dynamic multi-client SSE scheme that supports attribute-based authorization and efficient updates without re-encryption. Experimental results show it takes less than two seconds for 10-100 keyword queries and 14 seconds to retrieve 50 matching documents in a database with 100 keywords and 150 documents each.
Outsourcing encrypted data to the cloud creates a fundamental tension between data privacy and functional searchability. Current Searchable Symmetric Encryption (SSE) solutions frequently have significant limitations, such as excessive metadata leakage, or a lack of fine-grained access control. These issues restrict the scalability of secure searches in real-world applications where multiple clients require different levels of authorization. Our paper proposes MASSE, a dynamic multi-client SSE scheme incorporating attribute-based access control, which expands the OXT framework. With MASSE, clients are restricted sto searching for keywords authorized by their specific attribute sets, and the server remains unaware of the keywords and attributes. MASSE supports practical dynamic updates to documents, and client authorizations, including revocation, without requiring reencryption of the database or indices, or a large number of interactions. We formally prove the security of MASSE, that is, forward and backward privacy under a well-defined leakage profile, and token unforgeability. An experimental evaluation in a database containing 100 keywords, each associated with 150 documents, demonstrates the practical efficiency of MASSE. It takes less than two seconds to generate 10 to 100 keyword queries and 14 seconds to retrieve 50 matching documents. Theoretical results show that MASSE outperforms competing solutions, including OXT, and can be scaled to large encrypted databases. MASSE is also suitable for dynamic cloud deployments. Keywords: Searchable Encryption, SSE, Multi-Client, Attribute Based SSE, Access Control, Revocation, OXT