Verifiable Data Search with Fine-Grained Authorization in Edge Computing

In the research of searchable encryption, fine-grained data authorization is a convenient way to manage the search rights for users. Recently, Liu et al. proposed a fine-grained searchable scheme with verification, which can control the search authorization and verify the results. In this paper, we first present a forgery attack against Liu et al.’s scheme and then propose a novel scheme of verifiable data search with fine-grained authorization in edge environment. Based on the key aggregate mechanism and Merkle hash tree, our proposed scheme not only achieves file-oriented search permission management but also implements the correctness and completeness verification of search results. In addition, with the assistance of edge server, resource-constrained users can easily perform the tasks of search and verification. Finally, we prove our scheme is secure based on the decision l-bilinear Diffie–Hellman exponent problem. The performance analysis and experiment results demonstrate that our proposed scheme has lower computation, communication, and storage costs contrast to the existing schemes.