Experimental review of the IKK query recovery attack : Assumptions, recovery rate and improvements

In light of more data than ever being stored using cloud services and the request by the public for secure, privacy-enhanced, and easy-to-use systems, Searchable Encryption schemes were introduced. These schemes enable privacy-enhanced search among encrypted documents yet disclose (encrypted) queries and responses. The first query recovery attack, the IKK attack, uses the disclosed information to (partly) recover what plaintext words the client searched for. This can also leak information on the plaintext contents of the encrypted documents. Under specific assumptions, the IKK attack has been shown to potentially cause serious harm to the security of Searchable Encryption schemes.