Open Access

ARTICLE

Attribute-Based Keyword Search over the Encrypted Blockchain

Zhen Yang¹, Hongao Zhang¹, Haiyang Yu^1,*, Zheng Li¹, Bocheng Zhu¹, Richard O. Sinnott²
1 Faculty of Information Technology, Beijing University of Technology, Beijing, 100124, China
2 School of Computing and Information Systems, The University of Melbourne, Victoria, 3010, Australia
* Corresponding Author: Haiyang Yu. Email:
(This article belongs to this Special Issue: Blockchain Security)

Computer Modeling in Engineering & Sciences 2021, 128(1), 269-282. https://doi.org/10.32604/cmes.2021.015210

Received 02 December 2020; Accepted 15 March 2021; Issue published 28 June 2021

Abstract

To address privacy concerns, data in the blockchain should be encrypted in advance to avoid data access from all users in the blockchain. However, encrypted data cannot be directly retrieved, which hinders data sharing in the blockchain. Several works have been proposed to deal with this problem. However, the data retrieval in these schemes requires the participation of data owners and lacks finer-grained access control. In this paper, we propose an attribute-based keyword search scheme over the encrypted blockchain, which allows users to search encrypted files over the blockchain based on their attributes. In addition, we build a file chain structure to improve the efficiency of searching files with the same keyword. Security analysis proves the security of the proposed scheme. Theoretical analysis and experimental results in performance evaluation show that our scheme is feasible and efficient.

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Keywords

Blockchain; searchable encryption; attribute-based encryption; smart contract

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