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We survey the notion of provably secure searchable encryption (SE) by giving a complete and comprehensive overview of the two main SE techniques: searchable symmetric encryption (SSE) and public key encryption with keyword search (PEKS). Since the pioneering work of Song, Wagner, and Perrig (IEEE S&P '00), the field of provably secure SE has expanded to the point where we felt that taking stock would provide benefit to the community. The survey has been written primarily for the nonspecialist who has a basic information security background. Thus, we sacrifice full details and proofs of individual constructions in favor of an overview of the underlying key techniques. We categorize and compare the different SE schemes in terms of their security, efficiency, and functionality. For the experienced researcher, we point out connections between the many approaches to SE and identify open research problems. Two major conclusions can be drawn from our work. While the so-called IND-CKA2 security notion becomes prevalent in the literature and efficient (sublinear) SE schemes meeting this notion exist in the symmetric setting, achieving this strong form of security efficiently in the asymmetric setting remains an open problem. We observe that in multirecipient SE schemes, regardless of their efficiency drawbacks, there is a noticeable lack of query expressiveness that hinders deployment in practice.

In a ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption (CP-ABE) scheme, the data is encrypted under an access policy defined by a user who encrypts the data and a user secret key is associated with a set of attributes which identify the user. A user can decrypt the ciphertext if and only if his attributes satisfy the access policy. In CP-ABE, since the user enforces the access policy at the encryption phase, the policy moves with the encrypted data. This is important for data storage servers where data confidentiality must be preserved even if the server is compromised or un-trusted. In this paper, we provide an efficient CP-ABE scheme which can express any access policy represented by a formula involving ∧ and ∨ boolean operators. The scheme is secure under Decision Bilinear Diffie-Hellman assumption (DBDH). Furthermore, we extend the expressivity of the scheme by including of (threshold) operator in addition to ∧ and ∨ operators. We provide a comparison with existing CP-ABE schemes and show that our schemes are more efficient. Especially, the computational work done by the decryptor is reduced.

In Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-Based Encryption (CP-ABE), a user secret key is associated with a set of attributes, and the ciphertext is associated with an access policy over attributes. The user can decrypt the ciphertext if and only if the attribute set of his secret key satisfies the access policy specified in the ciphertext. Several CP-ABE schemes have been proposed, however, some practical problems, such as attribute revocation, still needs to be addressed. In this paper, we propose a mediated Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-Based Encryption (mCP-ABE) which extends CP-ABE with instantaneous attribute revocation. Furthermore, we demonstrate how to apply the proposed mCP-ABE scheme to securely manage Personal Health Records (PHRs).