Paper 2024/054

FEASE: Fast and Expressive Asymmetric Searchable Encryption

Abstract

Asymmetric Searchable Encryption (ASE) is a promising cryptographic mechanism that enables a semi-trusted cloud server to perform keyword searches over encrypted data for users. To be useful, an ASE scheme must support expressive search queries, which are expressed as conjunction, disjunction, or any Boolean formulas. In this paper, we propose a fast and expressive ASE scheme that is adaptively secure, called FEASE. It requires only 3 pairing operations for searching any conjunctive set of keywords independent of the set size and has linear complexity for encryption and trapdoor algorithms in the number of keywords. FEASE is based on a new fast Anonymous Key-Policy Attribute-Based Encryption (A-KP-ABE) scheme as our first proposal, which is of independent interest. To address optional protection against keyword guessing attacks, we extend FEASE into the first expressive Public-Key Authenticated Encryption with Keyword Search (PAEKS) scheme. We provide implementations and evaluate the performance of all three schemes, while also comparing them with the state of the art. We observe that FEASE outperforms all existing expressive ASE constructions and that our A-KP-ABE scheme offers anonymity with efficiency comparable to the currently fastest yet non-anonymous KP-ABE schemes FAME (ACM CCS 2017) and FABEO (ACM CCS 2022).