A Client-Server Prototype of a Symmetric Key Searchable Encryption Scheme Using Open-Source Applications

Searchable encryption is a cryptographic primitive that allows a user to confidentially store items on an outside server and grants the user the capability to search for any particular item that is stored without the server or any third party observers learning anything with regards to the item that is being searched for. In 2006, Curtmola et al. strengthened the security notions for symmetric-key searchable encyrption (SSE) and proposed two secure constructions that utilize only a conventional symmetric-key encryption scheme such as Advanced Encryption Standard (AES). In this work, we show a client-server prototype implementation of the adaptive-secure scheme by Curtmola et al. utilizing only open source software on both client and server side. We show that our implementation runs in reasonable time and provides confidential search functions as defined by SSE schemes.