Lightweight Searchable Public-Key Encryption with Forward Privacy over IIoT Outsourced Data

As more data from Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) devices are been outsourced to the cloud, the need to ensure/achieve data privacy will be increasingly pressing. Searchable public-key encryption is a promising tool to achieve data privacy without sacrificing data usability. However, most existing searchable public-key encryption schemes are either inefficient (e.g., expensive in terms of encryption and searching keywords) or lack the required (security) features such as forward privacy. To address these limitations, we propose a lightweight searchable public-key encryption with forward privacy. Specifically, the scheme allows us to achieve forward privacy in a public-key cryptography (i.e., asymmetric) setting, and has the same search performance as a number of practical searchable symmetric encryption schemes. The formal security analysis shows that the proposed scheme is chosen-keyword attack resilient and achieves forward privacy. Finally, the experimental results on a real-world dataset demonstrate that the proposed scheme is highly efficient and scalable in IIoT applications.