EVPIR: Efficient and Verifiable Privacy-Preserving Image Retrieval in Cloud-Assisted Internet of Things

With the proliferation of mobile devices and the advancement of cloud computing capabilities, cloud-assisted Internet of Things (IoT) attracts increased attention based on its computational and storage advantages. Upon these conveniences, there also raises privacy concerns that numerous solutions have been proposed to solve it. However, existing methods suffer from challenges such as low retrieval accuracy, inefficiency in large-scale image retrieval, and lack of efficient result verification. In this article, we propose an efficient verifiable privacy-preserving image retrieval scheme (EVPIR). Specifically, we design a hierarchical graph index to significantly enhance retrieval efficiency, which organizes image feature vectors into a multilevel structure, establishing connections between neighboring nodes within each layer and creating a highly structured and efficient retrieval framework. During the retrieval process, we employ a greedy search algorithm to navigate these connections and identify the closest neighbors across different levels, which makes the proposed multilevel approach reduce the search space at each level, achieving faster and more accurate retrieval. Furthermore, we design an efficient dynamic verifiable framework leveraging Chameleon hash functions and BLS signatures where we utilize Chameleon hash nodes based on Merkle hash trees (MHTs) to enable dynamic updates of the verification tree and employ BLS signatures to construct multiple verification nodes for effectively shortening the verification path. Finally, security analysis shows that EVPIR can defend various threat models and extensive experiments further demonstrate that EVPIR can improve retrieval and verification efficiency.