Enabling Efficient, Verifiable, and Secure Conjunctive Keyword Search in Hybrid-Storage Blockchains

Ningning Cui, Dong Wang, Jianxin Li, Huaijie Zhu, Xiaochun Yang, Jianliang Xu, Jie Cui, Hong Zhong

Abstract: Blockchain has emerged as a prevailing paradigm for decentralized applications due to its reliability and transparency. To scale up retrieval services, a common strategy is to use a hybrid storage model, where on-chain storage is responsible for small metadata and off-chain storage is for outsourced raw data. However, data security and result authenticity are ongoing challenges in this scenario, and little work has been done due to the difficulty of combining result verification and privacy preservation, especially for dynamic updates while supporting forward privacy. In this paper, we formally define the problem of efficient, verifiable, and secure conjunctive keyword search in hybrid-storage blockchains (vsChain) and propose a novel hybrid index that achieves efficient query and verification while supporting dynamic updates with forward privacy guarantee. Finally, we provide empirical evaluations using real and synthetic datasets to demonstrate the feasibility of our proposed scheme.