International Association
for Cryptologic Research

This talk introduces a new direction of research for searchable symmetric encryption (SSE). In contrast to previous research in SSE which focussed only on leakage from the encrypted index component of SSE, we consider the system-wide security of SSE schemes, encompassing both encrypted indices and encrypted documents. The SWiSSSE scheme that we present provably meets a strong, system-side security definition; our proof is complemented by cryptanalysis showing that the residual leakage does not render SWiSSSE vulnerable to known attacks. We believe that by taking a system-wide view of security for SSE, we can provide greater confidence to practitioners considering deployment of SSE schemes.