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

Volume 48 Issue 8

Aug. 2026

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Article Navigation > Journal of Electronics & Information Technology > 2026 > 48(8): 3213-3228

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, 2026, 48(8): 3213-3228. 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, 2026, 48(8): 3213-3228. 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 Axin^1
,,
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

Publish Date: 2026-08-01

Abstract

Abstract

Objective Ciphertext retrieval enables searching over encrypted data. Symmetric Searchable Encryption (SSE) constitutes a critical branch of ciphertext retrieval. However, cloud servers may return incorrect or incomplete results to conserve computational resources. Furthermore, adversaries may exploit information leaked from search and access patterns to recover keyword details, which introduces severe privacy risks. Therefore, preserving the privacy of search and access patterns while guaranteeing result verifiability is both necessary and meaningful. Nevertheless, existing verifiable SSE schemes supporting search and access pattern privacy generally adopt keyword traversal mechanisms with inefficient verification procedures. This imposes heavy computational and communication overhead on data users and fails to satisfy the requirements for efficient and secure ciphertext retrieval. Methods To tackle the above performance bottlenecks, this paper proposes an efficient verifiable ciphertext retrieval mechanism based on the Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) and Oblivious Random Access Machine (ORAM). The data user transmits keyword trapdoors to the Enclave inside TEE via a secure channel. The cloud server regards the Enclave as a client and leverages Path ORAM to implement oblivious access to the ciphertext database. This mechanism eliminates multi-round interactions and redundant information transmission between the Enclave and the user, rendering the size of keyword trapdoors independent of the scale of the keyword dictionary. To achieve verifiability of search results, the data user embeds a designated random number during polynomial construction and blinds the polynomial’s constant term using the output of a hash function. Upon receiving the search results, the user deblinds the blinded polynomial returned by the cloud server to reconstruct the complete polynomial, and validates the correctness of the search procedure and the integrity of search results by checking whether this designated random number is a root of the polynomial. Results and Discussions Benefiting from the above 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 the size of the global keyword dictionary, which effectively cuts communication and computational costs. Moreover, the scheme requires merely two random numbers to realize the verifiability of search results, substantially reducing the user-side local storage overhead. In addition, techniques including single-server single-round result retrieval and symmetric homomorphic encryption are adopted to further boost operational efficiency. Experimental results demonstrate that, under equivalent functionality, the proposed scheme achieves performance gains of several times or even orders of magnitude in query efficiency, database construction overhead, user-side local storage, and communication overhead. The proposed scheme achieves prominent advantages in ciphertext retrieval efficiency and overhead optimization, yet it has certain application limitations. The scheme is mainly designed for static ciphertext datasets and lacks adequate adaptability to dynamic ciphertext environments with frequent data insertion, deletion and update operations. Besides, we only optimize the performance for single-user search scenarios. For complex data-sharing scenarios such as multi-user concurrent search, the concurrent processing capability and permission isolation mechanism remain to be improved. Conclusions This paper proposes an efficient verifiable ciphertext retrieval scheme based on TEE. Combining hardware-level security isolation with oblivious data rearrangement, the scheme decouples keyword trapdoor size from the scale of the keyword dictionary. It verifies search result correctness via random number embedding and blinding of polynomial constant terms. With a single-round user-server interaction architecture and symmetric homomorphic encryption, the scheme further improves search efficiency. Comprehensive experiments show that this scheme substantially outperforms equivalent competing schemes in overall execution efficiency.
- Ciphertext retrieval,
- Symmetric searchable encryption,
- Trusted execution environment,
- Verifiability,
- Search and access pattern privacy

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References(40)

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