Generic Construction of Publicly Verifiable Predicate Encryption

Abstract

There is an increasing trend for data owners to store their data in a third-party cloud server and buy the service from the cloud server to provide information to other users. To ensure confidentiality, the data is usually encrypted. Therefore, an encrypted data searching scheme with privacy preserving is of paramount importance. Predicate encryption (PE) is one of the attractive solutions due to its attribute-hiding merit. However, as cloud is not always trusted, verifying the searched results is also crucial. Firstly, a generic construction of Publicly Verifiable Predicate Encryption (PVPE) scheme is proposed to provide verification for PE. We reduce the security of PVPE to the security of PE. However, from practical point of view, to decrease the communication overhead and computation overhead, an improved PVPE is proposed with the trade-off of a small probability of error.