A 2 BSE: Anonymous attribute based searchable encryption

Attribute Based Encryption (ABE) allows fine-grained access control along with data confidentiality. Anonymous Attribute Based Encryption (AABE) supports hiding the access control policies within ciphertext so that the receiver's information remains unknown to public. Keyword-based query search over encrypted storage has become a challenging research problem when (i) the search query should not reveal the user identity and (ii) the search procedure should be able to verify whether the access policy associated with cipher document matches with the user's access rights. In this paper, we present an anonymous attribute based searchable encryption (A 2 BSE) scheme that allows user to retrieve only a subset of documents, containing the keyword(s) that satisfies the user's search query and for which the user is having sufficient access rights. In A BSE scheme, the search operation does not reveal user's identity. The A 2 BSE scheme is secure under the selective ciphertext-policy with chosen plaintext attack and under the selective ciphertext-policy with chosen keyword attack. The A 2 BSE scheme is efficient in comparison to existing AABE schemes.