Practical Non-Interactive Searchable Encryption with Forward and Backward Privacy

Abstract

In Dynamic Symmetric Searchable Encryption (DSSE), forward privacy ensures that previous search queries cannot be associated with future updates, while backward privacy guarantees that subsequent search queries cannot be associated with deleted documents in the past. In this work, we propose a generic forward and backward-private DSSE scheme, which is, to the best of our knowledge, the first practical and non-interactive Type-II backward-private DSSE scheme not relying on trusted execution environments. To this end, we first introduce a new cryptographic primitive, named Symmetric Revocable Encryption (SRE), and propose a modular construction from some succinct cryptographic primitives. Then we present our DSSE scheme based on the proposed SRE, and instantiate it with lightweight symmetric primitives. At last, we implement our scheme and compare it with the most efficient Type-II backward-private scheme to date (Demertzis et al., NDSS 2020). In a typical network environment, our result shows that the search in our scheme outperforms it by 2 − 11× under the same security notion.