Constructing Certificateless Encryption with Keyword Search against Outside and Inside Keyword Guessing Attacks

Searchable public key encryption is a useful cryptographic paradigm that enables an untrustworthy server to retrieve the encrypted data without revealing the contents of the data. It offers a promising solution to encrypted data retrieval in cryptographic cloud storage. Certificateless public key cryptography (CLPKC) is a novel cryptographic primitive that has many merits. It overcomes the key escrow problem in identity-based cryptography (IBC) and the cumbersome certificate problem in conventional public key cryptography (PKC). Motivated by the appealing features of CLPKC, several certificateless encryption with keyword search (CLEKS) schemes have been presented in the literature. But, our cryptanalysis demonstrates that the previously proposed CLEKS frameworks suffer from the security vulnerability caused by the keyword guessing attack. To remedy the security weakness in the previous frameworks and provide resistance against both inside and outside keyword guessing attacks, we propose a new CLEKS framework. Under the new framework, we design a concrete CLEKS scheme and formally prove its security in the random oracle model. Compared with previous two CLEKS schemes, the proposed scheme has better overall performance while offering stronger security guarantee as it withstands the existing known types of keyword guessing attacks.