A general transformation from KP-ABE to searchable encryption

Users are inclined to share sensitive data in a remote server if no strong security mechanism is in place. Searchable encryption satisfies the need of users to execute a search encrypted data. Previous searchable encryption methods such as “public key encryption with keyword search (PEKS)” restricted the data access to certain users, because only the assigned users were able to search the encrypted data. In this paper we will discuss the relation between Attribute Based Encryption (ABE) and searchable encryption and define a weak anonymity of the ABE scheme, named “attribute privacy”. With this weak anonymity, we propose a general transformation from ABE to Attribute Based Encryption with Keyword Search (ABEKS) and a concrete attribute private key-policy ABE (KP-ABE) scheme. We present an ABEKS scheme based on this KP-ABE scheme and permit multi-users to execute a flexible search on the remote encrypted data.