Searchable encryption approaches: attacks and challenges

Abstract

Searchable encryption (SE) is a cryptographic technique that allows the users to perform search over outsourced encrypted data in cloud servers while preserving the privacy of data and search query. In order to preserve privacy and security, data owners use various encryption schemes to encrypt their data and indexes. Due to the vulnerabilities in the encryption schemes adopted by SE schemes, information leakages are possible from the encrypted data. The cloud servers use various information disclosure attacks that exploit these leakages to infer plaintext information. In this paper, we analyze the existing SE approaches with respect to their security and precision goals and possible attacks on them. We also identify the root causes of these attacks and their remedies. An experimental study is also performed to investigate the susceptibility of SE schemes against attacks and countermeasures to prevent them. 2018, Springer-Verlag London Ltd., part of Springer Nature.