Simple, secure, and efficient searchable symmetric encryption with multiple encrypted indexes

Abstract

In searchable symmetric encryption (SSE), adding documents to a database is an indispensable functionality in real situations, and there are two approaches for executing the process: One approach is to update the encrypted index, and the other is to generate a new encrypted index. The former approach is called dynamic SSE, which has been extensively studied recently due to its importance. The latter approach has an advantage such that it can be directly applied to any existing SSE scheme without degrading its original functionalities, but previous methods are not satisfactory from a viewpoint of security, storage size, or efficiency. In this paper, we propose a simple document adding method that resolve the problem occurred in the latter approach. Our method is quite generic, and therefore can be applied to any existing SSE scheme (e.g. non-dynamic one with useful functionalities). Our key idea is to utilize publicly available information and hash chains in construction of encrypted indexes. In order to exhibit the ability of our method, we present a concrete scheme which is led by applying our method to the well-known and influential scheme SSE-2 (ACM CCS 2006). Thanks to the simplicity of our method, the scheme can be easily proved secure under a naturally generalized setting of the most widely used security model.