Efficient and Verifiable Ciphertext Retrieval Scheme Based on Trusted Execution Environment

WU Axin; FENG Dengguo; ZHANG Min; CHI Jialin; YI Yuling

doi:10.11999/JEIT251358

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WU Axin, FENG Dengguo, ZHANG Min, CHI Jialin, YI Yuling. Efficient and Verifiable Ciphertext Retrieval Scheme Based on Trusted Execution Environment[J]. Journal of Electronics & Information Technology. doi: 10.11999/JEIT251358

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WU Axin, FENG Dengguo, ZHANG Min, CHI Jialin, YI Yuling. Efficient and Verifiable Ciphertext Retrieval Scheme Based on Trusted Execution Environment[J]. Journal of Electronics & Information Technology. doi: 10.11999/JEIT251358

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Efficient and Verifiable Ciphertext Retrieval Scheme Based on Trusted Execution Environment

doi: 10.11999/JEIT251358 cstr: 32379.14.JEIT251358

WU Axin¹,
FENG Dengguo^{1, 2, 3},
ZHANG Min^{2
,
,},
CHI Jialin²,
YI Yuling^{2, 3}

1.
State Key Laboratory of Cryptology, Beijing 100878, China
2.
Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100190, China
3.
University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049, China

Funds: The National Key R&D Program of China (2022YFB4501500, 2022YFB4501503)

Received Date: 2025-12-24
Accepted Date: 2026-02-12
Rev Recd Date: 2026-02-12

Available Online: 2026-03-04

Abstract

Abstract

The ciphertext retrieval mechanism enables retrieval over encrypted data. Symmetric Searchable Encryption (SSE) is a critical branch of ciphertext retrieval. However, to save computing resources, cloud servers may return incorrect or incomplete results. Moreover, attackers may exploit information leaked from search and access patterns to reconstruct keyword details. Therefore, protecting the privacy of search and access patterns, while ensuring result verifiability, is necessary and meaningful. Nevertheless, existing verifiable SSE schemes that support search and access pattern privacy usually rely on keyword traversal mechanisms, and their verification mechanisms are inefficient. This results in high computational and communication overhead for users. To address these performance bottlenecks, an efficient and verifiable ciphertext retrieval scheme based on Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) is proposed. To improve ciphertext retrieval efficiency, the scheme uses the collaborative implementation of hardware-level security isolation and oblivious data rearrangement, so that the size of the keyword trapdoor is independent of the size of the keyword dictionary. Meanwhile, the correctness of the returned results is verified by embedding random numbers and blinding the constant terms of polynomials. Owing to these designs, significant efficiency improvements are achieved. Specifically, the scheme ensures that the size of keyword trapdoors depends only on the number of query keywords rather than on the global dictionary size, which effectively reduces communication and computational costs. The scheme also requires only two random numbers to achieve verifiability, which substantially reduces the user's local storage overhead. In addition, techniques such as single-server, single-round result retrieval and symmetric homomorphic encryption are adopted to further improve operational efficiency. Moreover, confidential computing within TEE weakens the security assumptions and trust requirements imposed on TEE. After the security of the proposed scheme is formally proved by simulation-based methods, a comprehensive performance evaluation is conducted. The results confirm that the proposed scheme is substantially more efficient than other schemes with the same functionality.
- Ciphertext retrieval,
- Symmetric searchable encryption,
- Verifiability,
- Search and access pattern privacy,
- Trusted execution environment.

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References(40)

References

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