Searchable Symmetric Encryption- A Survey

Cryptology has opened possibilities for a fully secure communication and transfer of information between parties. With time, a lot of primitives have been proposed as improvements of the earlier ones. This paper focuses on a relatively new primitive, Searchable Symmetric Encryption. It allows updations in the information while it is stored on a trusted third party due to lack of resources. Earlier considered as impossible, the proposals by Goh using secure indexes and Ostrovsky-Goldreich on oblivious RAMs failed such notions. Now, information can reliably be stored and each segment of information can be retrieved when the need arises. SSE provides practical efficiency unlike generic cryptographic primitives like Homomorphic Encryption and Multi-party computation. Being a honeypot for researchers, a lot of developments have been going on in the direction of further optimizing SSE. A state-of-art discussion followed by a brief survey of some noteworthy research works is provided in the paper.