Securing Organization’s Data: A Role-Based Authorized Keyword Search Scheme With Efficient Decryption

For better data availability and accessibility while ensuring data secrecy, organizations often tend to outsource their encrypted data to the cloud storage servers, thus bringing the challenge of keyword search over encrypted data. In this article, we propose a novel authorized keyword search scheme using Role-Based Encryption (RBE) technique in a cloud environment. The contributions of this article are multi-fold. First, it presents a keyword search scheme which enables only authorized users, having properly assigned roles, to delegate keyword-based data search capabilities over encrypted data to the cloud providers without disclosing any sensitive information. Second, it supports a multi-organization cloud environment, where the users can be associated with more than one organization. Third, the proposed scheme provides efficient decryption, conjunctive keyword search and revocation mechanisms. Fourth, the proposed scheme outsources expensive cryptographic operations in decryption to the cloud in a secure manner. Fifth, we have provided a formal security analysis to prove that the proposed scheme is semantically secure against Chosen Plaintext and Chosen Keyword Attacks. Finally, our performance analysis shows that the proposed scheme is suitable for practical applications.