A searchable encryption scheme against data owner leakage and incomplete search results

As an essential security primitive, searchable encryption safeguards the security and availability of cloud-stored data. Attribute-Based Searchable Encryption (ABSE) achieves fine-grained access control while conducting retrieval based on keywords. Nevertheless, most existing ABSE schemes neglect privacy leakage incurred by misbehaviors of data owners, and the retrieved results fail to support verification. In practical scenarios, data owners may intentionally or unintentionally disclose secret keys and secret values of encrypted indices to third parties, resulting in the leakage of file contents and search keywords. Meanwhile, to reduce communication and storage overhead, cloud servers may return incomplete search results to users. To tackle these issues, this paper proposes a searchable encryption scheme that can resist privacy leakage from data owners and verify returned search results. This scheme incorporates sanitization operations to guarantee file security, user search keyword security, and integrity verification for results returned by the cloud server. We prove the security of the scheme, including indistinguishability against selective ciphertext-policy and chosen-plaintext attack (IND-sCP-CPA), as well as the unforgeability of index and trapdoor. Moreover, the performance analysis validates the feasibility of the proposed scheme.