Trapdoor Privacy in Asymmetric Searchable Encryption Schemes

Asymmetric searchable encryption allows searches to be carried over ciphertexts, through delegation, and by means of trapdoors issued by the owner of the data. Public Key Encryption with Keyword Search (PEKS) is a primitive with such functionality that provides delegation of exact-match searches. As it is important that ciphertexts preserve data privacy, it is also important that trapdoors do not expose the user’s search criteria. The difficulty of formalizing a security model for trapdoor privacy lies in the verification functionality, which gives the adversary the power of verifying if a trapdoor encodes a particular keyword. In this paper, we provide a broader view on what can be achieved regarding trapdoor privacy in asymmetric searchable encryption schemes, and bridge the gap between previous definitions, which give limited privacy guarantees in practice against search patterns. We propose the notion of Strong Search Pattern Privacy for PEKS and construct a scheme that achieves this security notion.