Forward Private Searchable Symmetric Encryption with Optimized I/O Efficiency

TL;DR

This paper introduces two new forward private searchable encryption schemes, FAST and FASTIO, which use symmetric cryptography to improve I/O efficiency and scalability compared to previous methods, making practical large-scale secure search feasible.

Contribution

The paper presents FAST and FASTIO, the first symmetric cryptography-based forward private searchable encryption schemes with optimized I/O performance.

Findings

Both schemes are highly efficient in practice.

FASTIO significantly improves I/O scalability.

Schemes outperform previous public key-based solutions.

Abstract

Recently, several practical attacks raised serious concerns over the security of searchable encryption. The attacks have brought emphasis on forward privacy, which is the key concept behind solutions to the adaptive leakage-exploiting attacks, and will very likely to become mandatory in the design of new searchable encryption schemes. For a long time, forward privacy implies inefficiency and thus most existing searchable encryption schemes do not support it. Very recently, Bost (CCS 2016) showed that forward privacy can be obtained without inducing a large communication overhead. However, Bost's scheme is constructed with a relatively inefficient public key cryptographic primitive, and has a poor I/O performance. Both of the deficiencies significantly hinder the practical efficiency of the scheme, and prevent it from scaling to large data settings. To address the problems, we first present FAST, which achieves forward privacy and the same communication efficiency as Bost's scheme, but uses only symmetric cryptographic primitives. We then present FASTIO, which retains all good properties of FAST, and further improves I/O efficiency. We implemented the two schemes and compared their performance with Bost's scheme. The experiment results show that both our schemes are highly efficient, and FASTIO achieves a much better scalability due to its optimized I/O.