Secure Keyword Search with Access Control Using Secret Sharing

Abstract - Searchable encryption allows users to perform search operations over encrypted data without revealing its contents, ensuring data confidentiality even during search queries. While substantial research has explored searchable encryption using public-key and symmetric encryption methods, these approaches often suffer from high computational overhead, particularly in large-scale cloud environments. To address these limitations, this paper proposes a secure keyword search approach that integrates user access control within a cloud-based environment using secret sharing-based searchable encryption. The system ensures each data file stored in the cloud is managed by a designated owner who controls which users are authorized to search the data. Our solution adopts a secure computation model operating between the data owner, the querying user, and multiple cloud servers. We demonstrate robustness against semi-honest adversaries and introduce an optimized version using an enhanced secret sharing technique for improved efficiency. The proposed methods are evaluated and compared based on computational performance and communication efficiency. Key Words: Searchable Encryption, Secret Sharing, Access Control, Cloud Data Outsourcing, RSA Encryption, Secure Computation, Privacy Preservation, Keyword Search, Blockchain, Multi-Party Computation