Efficient and secure identity-based encryption scheme with equality test in cloud computing

Efficient searching on encrypted data outsourced to the cloud remains a research challenge. Identity-based encryption with equality test (IBEET) scheme has recently been identified as a viable solution, in which users can delegate a trapdoor to the server and the server then searches on user outsourced encrypted data to determine whether two different ciphertexts are encryptions of the same plaintext. Such schemes are, unfortunately, inefficient particularly for deployment on mobile devices (with limited power/battery life and computing capacity). In this paper, we propose an efficient IBEET scheme with bilinear pairing, which reduces the need for time-consuming HashToPoint function. We then prove the security of our scheme for one-way secure against chosen identity and chosen ciphertext attacks (OW–ID–CCA) in the random oracle model (ROM). The performance evaluation of our scheme demonstrates that in comparison to the scheme of Ma (2016), our scheme achieves a reduction of 36.7% and 39.24% in computation cost during the encryption phase and test phase, respectively, and that our scheme is suitable for (mobile) cloud deployment.