Deterministic and Efficiently Searchable Encryption

Authors: Mihir Bellare, Alexandra Boldyreva, and Adam O'Neill

Preliminary version in Advances in Cryptology - Crypto 2007 Proceedings.
Revised and full version available here.

Abstract: We present as-strong-as-possible definitions of privacy, and constructions achieving them, for public-key encryption schemes where the encryption algorithm is deterministic. We obtain as a consequence database encryption methods that permit fast (ie. sub-linear, and in fact logarithmic, time) search while provably providing privacy that is as strong as possible subject to this fast search constraint. One of our constructs, called RSA-DOAEP, has the added feature of being length preserving, so that it is the first example of a public-key cipher. We generalize this to obtain a notion of efficiently-searchable encryption schemes which permit more flexible privacy to search-time trade-offs via a technique called bucketization. Our results answer much-asked questions in the database community and provide foundations for work done there.

Bibtex: @InProceedings{bbo, author ="Mihir Bellare and Alexandra Boldyreva and Adam O'Neill", title = "Deterministic and Efficiently Searchable Encryption", booktitle = "Advances in Cryptology - Crypto 2007", series = "Lecture Notes in Computer Science", publisher = "Springer-Verlag", year = "2007"}