Pairing-Free Certificate-Based Searchable Encryption Supporting Privacy-Preserving Keyword Search Function for IIoTs

As a practical application of the Internet of Things (IoT) in the modern industry, industrial IoT (IIoT) enables industrial enterprises to accelerate the development. Nowadays, the cloud computing technology has been applied to data storage and processing in IIoTs, but how to protect data privacy in the cloud has become a challenge and technical issue. Recently, the certificate-based encryption with keyword search (CBEKS) was presented to handle the cloud ciphertext retrieval. By CBEKS, one can get back all desired ciphertexts from the cloud without decrypting the ciphertexts or leaking the search keywords. However, the existing CBEKS scheme uses the computationally expensive bilinear pairing, which is disgusted by the performance-limited IIoT smart devices. In this article, a pairing-free and privacy-preserving CBEKS scheme is developed. The experimental results show that it has an obvious advantage in the computation performance when compared with the pairing-based CBEKS scheme. In addition, our security proofs indicate that it is secure against keyword guessing attacks.