A Verifiable and Efficient Secure Sharing Scheme in Multiowner Multiuser Settings

Data security has remained a challenging problem in cloud storage, especially in multiowner data sharing scenarios. As one of the most effective solutions for secure data sharing, multikeyword ranked searchable encryption (MRSE) has been widely used. However, most of the existing MRSE schemes have some shortcomings in multiowner data sharing, such as index trees generated by data owners, relevance scores in plaintext form, and lack of verification function. In this article, we propose a verifiable and efficient secure sharing scheme in multiowner multiuser settings, where the index tree is generated by the trusted authority. To achieve verifiable functionality, the blockchain-based smart contract is adopted to execute the search algorithm. Based on a distributed two-trapdoor public-key cryptosystem, the data uploaded and used are in ciphertext form, and the proposed algorithms are secure in our scheme. For improving efficiency, the encrypted data are aggregated according to the category and the Category ID-based index tree is generated. Extensive experiments are conducted to demonstrate that it can reduce the time cost of index construction by 75% and the time cost of search by 53%, approximately. Moreover, multithreaded optimization is introduced in our scheme, which can reduce the time cost of index construction by 76% and the time cost of search by 67%, approximately (with 16 threads).

I. Introduction

Cloud computing offers economic savings and flexible usage [1], providing users with universal and efficient network access. Instead of purchasing lots of equipment to store and manage data, both individuals and enterprises are motivated to outsource their data to the cloud. However, the hidden security issues prompt cloud users to encrypt the data before outsourcing [2]. With the increasing network attacks, secure data sharing in multiowner scenarios still remains a significant challenge.