Toward Data Security in 6G Networks: A Public-Key Searchable Encryption Approach

With the advances of the fifth generation (5G) mobile communication technology, smart applications enhance the quality of daily life, the urban management by the government and the effective allocation of resources. Smart applications collect data through the Internet of Things, store massive data in the cloud server, and use cloud computing and deep learning to analyze the data, according to the data analysis results to guide human production and life. However, with the breakthrough of 6G technology, the amount of data applied is increasing, and the demand for privacy protection is becoming more prominent. Encrypting data using traditional cryptographic algorithms can solve the problem of privacy leakage, but it hampers the availability of the data. Searchable encryption is a special encryption structure with keyword search, which balances the availability and privacy of massive data. In this article, we analyze some typical security and privacy issues in 6G-based applications, discuss the solutions to these problems, and present a framework of 6G-based smart cities with searchable encryption, which provides a guarantee for the privacy and availability of smart city data (including ciphertext search, access control, etc.). We also propose a searchable encryption solution based on ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption to solve the conflict between security and data availability of the smart cities as a specific scenario in order to demonstrate the contribution of cryptographic technologies such as public-key searchable encryption to the 6th generation mobile communication technology.