Fuzzy keyword search over encrypted data in the public key setting

Abstract

Searchable encryption is used to support searches over encrypted data stored on cloud servers. Traditional searchable encryption only supports exact keyword search instead of more flexible fuzzy keyword search. To solve this problem, a recent emerging paradigm, named fuzzy keyword searchable encryption, has been proposed. There have been some proposals designed for fuzzy keyword search in the symmetric key setting, but none efficient schemes in the public key setting. In this paper, we propose a new primitive of interactive public key encryption with fuzzy keyword search (IPEFKS), which supports efficient fuzzy keyword search over encrypted data in the public key setting. We construct and implement a homomorphic encryption based IPEFKS scheme. To compare this scheme with the existing ones, we implement LWW-FKS, which, to the best of our knowledge, is the most efficient among the existing schemes. The experimental results show that IPEFKS is much more efficient than LWW-FKS. © 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.