Verifiable searchable encryption scheme that supports semantic search over massive medical data
Online published: 2026-06-29
Copyright
With the rapid development and wide application of cloud computing and the medical Internet of Things, massive medical data have become the core strategic resource in the medical field. While cloud storage supports the management of such data, it also brings the challenges of privacy protection and efficient retrieval. Existing searchable encryption schemes suffer from low retrieval efficiency over massive data, lack of semantic relevance, and unverifiable results, making it difficult to adapt to the retrieval requirements of medical data. This paper proposes a verifiable searchable encryption scheme that supports semantic search over massive medical data. The scheme designs a two-stage retrieval architecture of “coarse matching + fine ranking”. Fast coarse matching of massive high-dimensional semantic vectors is achieved based on locality-sensitive hashing, and accurate sorting in the ciphertext domain is achieved by designing privacy-preserving Euclidean distance comparison mechanism. A batch verification mechanism with public-key encryption and private-key verification is constructed to verify the correctness of retrieval results. Meanwhile, an improved matrix-based Learning with Errors (LWE) encryption mode is exploited to build a full-process ciphertext-domain interaction mechanism, which realizes the confidentiality of medical data features in a quantum-resistant environment, and guarantees the privacy security of medical data and retrieval intentions under multi-subject collaboration. Performance analysis and experimental simulations demonstrate the search computation time of the scheme is no more than 25 seconds for one million data items, which is much lower than existing linear-scan retrieval schemes. In terms of communication overhead, it is reduced by 50% compared with other schemes supporting vector retrieval. The proposed scheme has outstanding performance advantages and can effectively satisfy the privacy-preserving retrieval requirements of massive medical data.
Zhang Jingwei , Sun Sa , Yang Shuai , Wu Ying , Zhang Xiaojun . Verifiable searchable encryption scheme that supports semantic search over massive medical data[J]. Journal of Cybersecurity, 2026 . DOI: 10.20172/j.issn.2097-3136.260536
表 2 不同模型明文与密文检索准确率(MAP)对比Table 2 The comparison of MAP between plaintext and ciphertext for different models |
| all-MiniLM- L6-v2 | all-MiniLM- L6-v1 | all-MiniLM- L12-v2 | msmarco-MiniLM- L-6-v3 | |
| 明文 | ||||
| 密文 |
表 3 计算开销比较Table 3 The computation overhead comparison |
| 算法 | 方案[28] | 方案[24] | 方案[23] | 本方案 |
| DataEnc | + | |||
| Trapdoor | ||||
| search | ||||
| verify | - | - |
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