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Paper 2024/865

Result Pattern Hiding Boolean Searchable Encryption: Achieving Negligible False Positive Rates in Low Storage Overhead

Abstract

Boolean Searchable Symmetric Encryption (SSE) enables secure outsourcing of databases to an untrusted server in encrypted form and allows the client to execute secure Boolean queries involving multiple keywords. The leakage of keyword pair result pattern (KPRP) in a Boolean search poses a significant threat, which reveals the intersection of documents containing any two keywords involved in a search and can be exploited by attackers to recover plaintext information about searched keywords (USENIX Security’16). However, existing KPRP-hiding schemes either rely on Bloom filters (S&P’14, CCS’18), leading to high false positive search results (where non-matching documents could be erroneously identified as matches) that hinder the extension to multi-client settings (CCS’13), or require excessive server storage (PETS’23), making them impractical for large-scale sparse databases. In this paper, we introduce Hidden Boolean Search (HBS), the first KPRP-hiding Boolean SSE scheme with both negligible false positives (essential for satisfying the standard correctness definition of SSE) and low server storage requirements. HBS leverages a novel cryptographic tool called Result-hiding Filter (RH-filter). It distinguishes itself as the first tool that supports computationally correct membership queries with hiding results at nearly constant overhead. With the help of RH-filter, compared to the most efficient KPRP-hiding scheme (CCS’18) in terms of overall storage and search efficiency, HBS surpasses it across all performance metrics, mitigates false positives, and achieves significantly stronger query expressiveness. We further extend HBS to the dynamic setting, resulting in a scheme named DHBS, which maintains KPRP-hiding while ensuring forward and backward privacy—two critical security guarantees in the dynamic setting.