Dynamic and Verifiable Fuzzy Keyword Search With Forward Security in Cloud Environments

Dynamic searchable symmetric encryption (DSSE) ensures that outsourced data can be searched and updated without compromising data availability. Recent efforts on DSSE have mainly focused on exact keyword retrieval, but considering that misspellings are common and practical, it is necessary to support the functionality of fuzzy keyword search. However, most existing fuzzy keyword search schemes do not consider malicious cloud servers and forward-privacy guarantees. The former may lead to the implementation of a fraction of search operations or forge the results and the latter may reveal the association between the newly updated data and previous search tokens. Therefore, in this article, we investigate the issue of dynamic and verifiable fuzzy keyword search with forward security (DVFKF). Specifically, DVFKF first uses locality sensitive hash to map approximate keywords into the same hash bucket, then links the hash buckets to obtain the bucket strings. Next, to accelerate the performance and support forward privacy, we propose a chain index for each bucket string through counters. Further, to guarantee the integrity of the results, we integrate the Merkle hash tree and chain index to verify the correctness and completeness of the results. Finally, we conduct formal security analysis and empirical evaluations to demonstrate the feasibility and practicality of our scheme on real datasets.