Paper 2025/1377

More Practical Non-interactive Encrypted Conjunctive Search with Leakage and Storage Suppression

Abstract

Searchable symmetric encryption allows clients to outsource their databases to a semi-trusted cloud server while enabling private searches. The Oblivious Cross-Tag (OXT) protocol is a fundamental approach to conjunctive keyword search, ensuring that search performance scales with the least frequent keyword while introducing keyword pair result pattern (KPRP) and intersection result pattern (IP) leakages. However, recent studies show that the KPRP leakage in OXT can be exploited, allowing the cloud server to infer information about the client database. Several works have aimed to mitigate this issue, with Doris being the first non-interactive OXT-based scheme to hide KPRP and IP leakages. However, this comes at the cost of increased storage overhead. In this work, we propose a Doris-based conjunctive SSE scheme with improved storage efficiency. We replace the XOR filter in Doris with our XEBFF filter, which formalizes XOR filters and Binary Fuse Filters. Additionally, we introduce a frequency estimation approach using Count-Min Sketch to efficiently determine the least frequent keyword, which all previous OXT-based schemes overlook. Our scheme reduces storage overhead by 8% compared to Doris while maintaining search performance. With our s-term selection protocol, we ensure that search operations typically scale with the least frequent keyword.