Certificateless Searchable Public Key Encryption With Trapdoor Indistinguishability for IoV

With the development of the Internet of Vehicles (IoV), data sharing as a key service for most IoV applications has emerged as an effective way to break down data silos and unlock the data's potential. In order to guarantee the security and confidentiality of the data-sharing process, various advanced cryptographic techniques have been proposed by both the research community and industry. As one of the most intensive primitives among these techniques, searchable encryption (SE) has attracted extensive attention. SE enables users to search encrypted sharing data without decrypting operations. However, most existing works suffer from drawbacks such as privacy leakage, deployment complexity, or low efficiency when applied in practical IoV environments. In this paper, we design a lightweight certificateless searchable public key encryption (CLSPKE) scheme with trapdoor indistinguishability to simultaneously solve the above security and efficiency problems. The proposed scheme not only eliminates the need for complex certificate management and key escrow issues, but also achieves trapdoor indistinguishability without relying on the bilinear pairing operation. We compare the proposed scheme with other relevant schemes and implement its prototype. Extensive experiments and evaluations indicate that the proposed scheme is practical as it significantly reduces computation and communication costs while still maintaining strong privacy protection.