Outsourced symmetric private information retrieval

In the setting of searchable symmetric encryption (SSE), a data owner D outsources a database (or document/file collection) to a remote server E in encrypted form such that D can later search the collection at E while hiding information about the database and queries from E. Leakage to E is to be confined to well-defined forms of data-access and query patterns while preventing disclosure of explicit data and query plaintext values. Recently, Cash et al. presented a protocol, OXT, which can run arbitrary boolean queries in the SSE setting and which is remarkably efficient even for very large databases. In this paper we investigate a richer setting in which the data owner D outsources its data to a server E but D is now interested to allow clients (third parties) to search the database such that clients learn the information D authorizes them to learn but nothing else while E still does not learn about the data or queried values as in the basic SSE setting. Furthermore, motivated by a wide range of applications, we extend this model and requirements to a setting where, similarly to private information retrieval, the client's queried values need to be hidden also from the data owner D even though the latter still needs to authorize the query. Finally, we consider the scenario in which authorization can be enforced by the data owner D without D learning the policy, a setting that arises in court-issued search warrants. We extend the OXT protocol of Cash et al. to support arbitrary boolean queries in all of the above models while withstanding adversarial non-colluding servers (D and E) and arbitrarily malicious clients, and while preserving the remarkable performance of the protocol. © 2013 ACM.