StopGuess: A framework for public-key authenticated encryption with keyword search

Public key encryption with keyword search (PEKS) allows users to search on encrypted data without leaking the keyword information from the ciphertexts. But it does not preserve keyword privacy within the trapdoors, because an adversary (e.g., untrusted server) might launch inside keyword-guessing attacks (IKGA) to guess keywords from the trapdoors. In recent years, public key authenticated encryption with keyword search (PAEKS) has become a promising primitive to counter the IKGA. However, existing PAEKS schemes focus on the concrete construction of PAEKS, making them unable to support modular construction, intuitive proof, or flexible extension. In this paper, our proposal called “StopGuess” is the first elegant framework to achieve the above-mentioned features. StopGuess provides a general solution to eliminate IKGA, and we can construct a bundle of PAEKS schemes from different cryptographic assumptions under the framework. To show its feasibility, we present two generic constructions of PAEKS and their (pairing-based and lattice-based) instantiations in a significantly simpler and more modular manner. Besides, without additional costs, we extend PAEKS to achieve anonymity which preserves the identity of users; we integrate it with symmetric encryption to support data retrieval functionality which makes it practical in resource-constrained applications.