A Blockchain-Based Anonymous Attribute-Based Searchable Encryption Scheme for Data Sharing

Attribute-based searchable encryption (ABSE) is a promising encryption mechanism for sharing outsourced encrypted data in clouds, allowing fine-grained access control over data while searching for encrypted data. However, the access policy in the most existing ABSE schemes exists in plaintext, which could expose sensitive information about legitimate data users. Moreover, such schemes delegate complex search operations to a cloud server, which can lead to data tampering and even untrusted results, and single point of failure. In this article, we propose a blockchain (BC)-based anonymous ABSE scheme for data sharing (BADS). First, attributes of the access policy are hidden, thus, providing confidentiality to the set of attributes that satisfy the access policy. Then combining ABSE with BC have features of tamper-proof, integrity verification, and nonrepudiation. In particular, information, such as secure index is stored in BC, while encrypted data is stored in a distributed system called the interplanetary file system (IPFS) to avoid single point of failure. Finally, BADS supports the matching algorithm that perform a fixed number of pairing operations before searching algorithm. We analysis security and evaluate performance to show the efficiency and practicability of BADS.