A Secure and Efficient Data Sharing and Searching Scheme in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSN) generally utilize cloud computing to store and process sensing data in real time, namely, cloud-assisted WSN. However, the cloud-assisted WSN faces new security challenges, particularly outsourced data confidentiality. Data Encryption is a fundamental approach but it limits target data retrieval in massive encrypted data. Public key encryption with keyword search (PEKS) enables a data receiver to retrieve encrypted data containing some specific keyword in cloud-assisted WSN. However, the traditional PEKS schemes suffer from an inherent problem, namely, the keyword guessing attack (KGA). KGA includes off-line KGA and on-line KGA. To date, the existing literature on PEKS cannot simultaneously resist both off-line KGA and on-line KGA performed by an external adversary and an internal adversary. In this work, we propose a secure and efficient data sharing and searching scheme to address the aforementioned problem such that our scheme is secure against both off-line KGA and on-line KGA performed by external and internal adversaries. We would like to stress that our scheme simultaneously achieves document encryption/decryption and keyword search functions. We also prove our scheme achieves keyword security and document security. Furthermore, our scheme is more efficient than previous schemes by eliminating the pairing computation.