Public Key Encryption with Equality Test for Heterogeneous Systems in Cloud Computing

Cloud computing provides a broad range of services like operating systems, hardware, software and resources. Availability of these services encourages data owners to outsource their intensive computations and massive data to the cloud. However, considering the untrusted nature of cloud server, it is essential to encrypt the data before outsourcing it to the cloud. Unfortunately, this leads to a challenge when it comes to providing search functionality for encrypted data located in the cloud. To address this challenge, this paper presents a public key encryption with equality test for heterogeneous systems (PKE-ET-HS). The PKE-ET-HS scheme simulates certificateless public encryption with equality test (CLE-ET) with the identity-based encryption with equality test (IBE-ET). This scheme provides the authorized cloud server the right to actuate the equivalence of two messages having their encryptions performed under heterogeneous systems. Basing on the random oracle model, we construct the security of our proposed scheme under the bilinear Diffie-Hellman (BDH) assumption. Eventually, we evaluate the size of storage, computation complexities, and properties with other related works and illustrations indicate good performance from our scheme.