LMCLAEKS: LWE-assisted multi-recipient certificateless authenticated encryption with keyword search

In Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) environments, interconnected gadgets and sensors produce large-scale, dynamic, and private data by the arrival of the fourth industrial revolution. Such data must be stored by cloud service providers (CSP) and is capable of accessed by consumers. To guarantee data privacy, Public-key Encryption with Keyword Search (PEKS) is a cryptographic primitive designed to resolve this challenge, which is troubled by costly certificate management and key escrow problem. The majority of current PEKS schemes rely on expensive bilinear paring and single-receiver, which are highly vulnerable to keyword guessing attacks (KGA) and have low computational efficiency. Consequently, we propose an Multi-recipient Certificateless Authenticated Encryption with Keyword Search (MCLAEKS) scheme, which has the following advantages: 1) hiding search pattern; 2) data allows multiple consumers; 3) involving no costly bilinear pairing operations; 4) resisting Inside Keyword Guessing Attacks (IKGA). The comparison and analysis of performance indicate that the proposed scheme is more efficient than existing PEKS schemes and is suitable for the IIoT environment.