TY - JOUR

T1 - Survey on Secure Keyword Search over Outsourced Data

T2 - From Cloud to Blockchain-assisted Architecture

AU - Wu, Haiqin

AU - Düdder, Boris

AU - Wang, Liangmin

AU - Cao, Zhenfu

AU - Zhou, Jun

AU - Feng, Xia

N1 - Funding Information: This work was supported in part by the National Key R&D Program of China under Grants 2020YFB1005500, the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grants 62202167, 62132005, 62172161, and 62172162, the Natural Science Foundation of Shanghai under Grant 20ZR1418400, the leading-edge Technology of Jiangsu Natural Science Foundation under Grant BK20202001, the Danish Ministry of Education and Science, Digital Pilot Hub and Skylab Digital. Publisher Copyright: © 2023 Copyright held by the owner/author(s). Publication rights licensed to ACM.

PY - 2023

Y1 - 2023

N2 - Secure keyword search is a prevailing search service offered in outsourced environments. However, with the increasingly severe security vulnerabilities of conventional centralized outsourcing, the architecture of secure keyword search, with searchable encryption (SE) as the underlying technique, has recently shifted from cloud-centered models to blockchain-assisted models. Existing surveys commonly fail to capture such an evolution and the corresponding benefits. What on earth does blockchain bring about and what are the unexplored challenges? This survey provides a systematic review of secure keyword search over outsourced data from cloud to blockchain-assisted architectures. We propose a taxonomy assorting present studies, depending on whether cloud/blockchain and data sharing are included, in which blockchain-assisted architecture is further divided into blockchain-side and cloud-side keyword search, respectively. Technically, we conclude five types of representative SE techniques with fitting architectures, either cryptographic-based or hardware-dependent. Notably, we propose comprehensive methodologies to select relevant papers, discuss, and compare existing schemes regarding functionalities, security, efficiency, and fairness (up to 21 compared items). Finally, open issues and potential research directions are identified for future work. We aspire to help pave the way for addressing the theoretical and empirical aspects of secure keyword search and full-fledged real-world implementation of blockchain-based keyword search applications.

AB - Secure keyword search is a prevailing search service offered in outsourced environments. However, with the increasingly severe security vulnerabilities of conventional centralized outsourcing, the architecture of secure keyword search, with searchable encryption (SE) as the underlying technique, has recently shifted from cloud-centered models to blockchain-assisted models. Existing surveys commonly fail to capture such an evolution and the corresponding benefits. What on earth does blockchain bring about and what are the unexplored challenges? This survey provides a systematic review of secure keyword search over outsourced data from cloud to blockchain-assisted architectures. We propose a taxonomy assorting present studies, depending on whether cloud/blockchain and data sharing are included, in which blockchain-assisted architecture is further divided into blockchain-side and cloud-side keyword search, respectively. Technically, we conclude five types of representative SE techniques with fitting architectures, either cryptographic-based or hardware-dependent. Notably, we propose comprehensive methodologies to select relevant papers, discuss, and compare existing schemes regarding functionalities, security, efficiency, and fairness (up to 21 compared items). Finally, open issues and potential research directions are identified for future work. We aspire to help pave the way for addressing the theoretical and empirical aspects of secure keyword search and full-fledged real-world implementation of blockchain-based keyword search applications.

KW - blockchain

KW - cloud security

KW - Outsourced keyword search

KW - searchable encryption

KW - verifiability

U2 - 10.1145/3617824

DO - 10.1145/3617824

M3 - Journal article

AN - SCOPUS:85176730467

VL - 56

JO - ACM Computing Surveys

JF - ACM Computing Surveys

SN - 0360-0300

IS - 3

M1 - 63

ER -