Public key encryption with keyword search based on K-resilient IBE

Abstract

An encrypted email is sent from Bob to Alice. A gateway wants to check whether a certain keyword exists in an email or not for some reason (e.g. routing). Nevertheless Alice does not want the email to be decrypted by anyone except her including the gateway itself. This is a scenario where public key encryption with keyword search (PEKS) is needed. In this paper we construct a new scheme (KR-PEKS) the K-Resilient Public Key Encryption with Keyword Search. The new scheme is secure under a chosen keyword attack without the random oracle. The ability of constructing a Public Key Encryption with Keyword Search from an Identity Based Encryption was used in the construction of the KR-PEKS. The security of the new scheme was proved by showing that the used IBE has a notion of key privacy. The scheme was then modified in two different ways in order to fulfill each of the following: the first modification was done to enable multiple keyword search and the other was done to remove the need of secure channels. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.