A Generic Construction of Secure-Channel Free Searchable Encryption with Multiple Keywords

In public key encryption with keyword search (PEKS), a secure channel must be required in order to send trapdoors to the server, whereas in secure-channel free PEKS (SCF-PEKS), no such secure channel is required. As an extension of SCF-PEKS, Wang et al. (NSS 2016) proposed SCF-PEKS with multiple keywords (SCF-MPEKS). In this paper, we further extend the Wang et al. result by proposing the generic construction of SCF-MPEKS from hidden vector encryption (HVE), tag-based encryption, and a one-time signature. Our generic construction provides adaptive security, where the test queries are allowed in the security model, and does not require random oracles. On the other hand, the Wang et al. scheme did not consider adaptive security, and the scheme is secure in the random oracle model. We give an instantiation of our generic construction by employing the Park-Lee-Susilo-Lee HVE scheme (Information Sciences 2013). This is the first adaptive secure SCF-MPEKS scheme in the standard model.