A more efficient public-key authenticated encryption scheme with keyword search

To realize ciphertext retrieval without decryption in the public key settings, Boneh et al. in 2004 proposed a cryptographic primitive named Public-key Encryption with Keyword Search (PEKS) and proposed the first PEKS scheme. Following Boneh et al.’s work, various PEKS schemes were proposed; however, most schemes are vulnerable to inside keyword guessing attacks (IKGA). Huang and Li proposed a new primitive named Public-key Authenticated Encryption with Keyword Search (PAEKS) in 2017, which resists the IKGA in the setting of only one test server. Their main idea to resist IKGA is to require the data sender to authenticate the ciphertext while encrypting a keyword. However, in the era of big data, as the number of encrypted files increases, huge storage overhead and heavy retrieval costs become problems in PAEKS. In this paper, we proposed a new PAEKS scheme that costs low storage space and supports fast search. We introduced the ciphertext deduplication into PAEKS to reduce storage space and leveraged the inverted index to accelerate the retrieval process. We simulated the proposed scheme and several related schemes with a desktop computer. The experiment results show that our proposed scheme is of lower storage overhead and higher retrieval efficiency compared with related schemes.