A certificateless and KGA-secure searchable encryption scheme with constant trapdoors in smart city✩

Hongjun Li; Debiao He; P. Vijayakumar; Fayez Alqahtani; Amr Tolba

doi:10.1016/j.dcan.2024.08.005

›› 2026, Vol. 12 ›› Issue (1) :198 -209. DOI: 10.1016/j.dcan.2024.08.005

Special issue on cyber-physical systems for intelligent transportation and smart cities

research-article

A certificateless and KGA-secure searchable encryption scheme with constant trapdoors in smart city^✩

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^a School of Cyber Science and Engineering, Wuhan University, Wuhan 430072, China

^b Shandong Computer Science Center, Qilu University of Technology (Shandong Academy of Sciences), Jinan 250014, China

^c Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University College of Engineering Tindivanam, Tamil Nadu 604001, India

^d Software Engineering Department, College of Computer and Information Sciences, King Saud University, Riyadh 12372, Saudi Arabia

^e Computer Science Department, Community College, King Saud University, Riyadh 11437, Saudi Arabia

^* School of Cyber Science and Engineering, Wuhan University, Wuhan 430072, China. E-mail addresses: lihongjun@whu.edu.cn (H. Li), hedebiao@163.com (D. He), vijibond2000@gmail.com (P. Vijayakumar), fhalqahtani@ksu.edu.sa (F. Alqahtani), atolba@ksu.edu.sa (A. Tolba).

Hongjun Li received the master’s degree from the College of Computer Science and Technology, Qingdao University, Qingdao, China, in 2021. He is currently pursuing the Ph.D. degree with the Key Laboratory of Aerospace Information Security and Trusted Computing, Ministry of Education, School of Cyber Science and Engineering, Wuhan Uni-versity, Wuhan 430072, China. His research interest includes cloud computing security and secure outsourcing computation.

Debiao He received his Ph.D. degree in applied mathematics from School of Mathe-matics and Statistics, Wuhan University, Wuhan, China in 2009. He is currently a professor of the School of Cyber Science and Engineering, Wuhan University, Wuhan, China. His main research interests include cryptography and information security, in particular, cryptographic protocols. He has published over 150 research papers in refereed inter-national journals and conferences, such as IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing, IEEE Transactions on Information Security and Forensic, and Usenix Secu-rity Symposium. He is the recipient of the 2018 IEEE Systems Journal Best Paper Award and the 2019 IET Information Security Best Paper Award. His work has been cited more than 7000 times at Google Scholar. He is in the Editorial Board of several international journals, such as Journal of Information Security and Applications, Frontiers of Computer Science, and Human-centric Computing & Information Sciences.

Pandi Vijayakumar received the B.E. degree in Computer Science and Engineering from Madurai Kamaraj University, Madurai, India, in 2002, the M.E. degree in Computer Science and Engineering from the Karunya Institute of Technology, Coimbatore, India, in 2005, and the Ph.D. degree in Computer Science and Engineering from Anna University, Chennai, India, in 2013. He is presently working as a Professor and Dean in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at J.J. College of Engineering and Technology. He has 20 years of teaching experience and has produced 04 Ph.D. candidates successfully. He has also authored and co-authored more than 100 quality papers in various IEEE trans-actions/journals, ACM transactions, Elsevier, IET, Springer, Wiley, KeAi and IGI Global journals. He is serving as Associate Editor in many SCI indexed journals namely IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems (T-ITS), IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine, International Journal of Communication Systems (Wiley), International Journal of Semantic Web and Information Systems (IGI Global), and Security and Privacy (Wiley). Moreover, He is serving as an Academic Editor in the International Journal of Organiza-tional and Collective Intelligence (IGI Global), International Journal of Software Science and Computational Intelligence (IGI Global), International Journal of Cloud Applications and Computing (IGI Global), International Journal of Digital Strategy, Governance, and Business Transformation (IGI Global). He is also serving as a Technical Committee member in the journal Computer Communications (Elsevier). He is the Founding Editor-in-Chief of the journal Cyber Security and Applications (KeAi|Elsevier). He also served as Academic Editor of Security and Communication Networks from November 2020 to December 2023 and Associate Editor of PLOS One for the period of three years. Till now he has authored five books for various subjects that belong to the Department of Computer Science and Engineering. He is a senior member of IEEE. He is also listed in the world’s Top 2% Sci-entists for citation impact for the four consecutive years 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2024 by Stanford University, USA. His name also Ranked 65th position in India among Best Scien-tists in the Department of Computer Science for the year 2025 released by Research.com. Dr. Vijayakumar also served as part of the academic administration in diﬀerent capaci-ties, including Dean in charge (Anna University, 3.6 yrs.), Zonal Coordinator of Zone V (Anna University, 3yrs.), Member of Board of Studies/Faculty Board/Academic Council, AISHE Nodal Oﬃcer, Chairman-Anti-ragging committee, etc.

Fayez Alqahtani is currently a Professor with the Department of Software Engineer-ing, College of Computer and Information Sciences, King Saud University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. He is also the Vice Dean for Educational and Academic Aﬀairs. His research inter-ests include various domains in information and communication technologies, including web 2.0, information security, enterprise architecture, software process improvement, the Internet of Things (IoT), and fog computing. He has actively participated in numerous academic conferences and scholarly initiatives. He is a member of several academic and professional associations, including the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the Australian Computer Society (ACS), and the Association for Information Systems (AIS).

Amr Tolba received the M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees from the Mathematics and Com-puter Science Department, Faculty of Science, Menoufia University, Egypt, in 2002 and 2006, respectively. He is currently a full professor of computer science at King Saud Uni-versity (KSU), Saudi Arabia. He has authored/coauthored over 300 scientific papers in top-ranked (ISI) international journals (such as Artificial Intelligence Review, IEEE IoT, ACM TOIT, IEEE CEMAG, IEEE ACCESS, IEEE SYSTEMS, FGCS, JNCA, NC&A, JAIHC, COMNET, COMCOM, P2PNET, VCOM, WWWJ,... etc.). Prof. Tolba served as a technical program committee (TPC) member at several conferences (Such as IoTCCT 2025, EAI Mo-biHealth 2025, SCAI 2024, MLISE 2024, SAI 2024, MLKE2023, DSIT 2022, CICA2022, EAI MobiHealth 2021, DSS 2021, AEMCSE 2021, ICBDM 2021, ICISE 2021, DSS 2020, NCO 2020, ICISE2019, ICCSEA 2019, DSS 2019, FCES 19, ICISE 2018, ESG’18, Smart Data’17, NECO 2017, NC’17, WEMNET’17, NET’17, Smart Data’16,...). He has been included in the list of the top 2% of influential researchers globally (prepared by scientists from Stanford University, USA) during the calendar years 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2024 respec-tively. Prof. Tolba served as Associate Editor/Guest Editor for several ISI journals. He has translated four books into the Arabic language. His main research interests include arti-ficial intelligence (AI), the Internet of Things (IoT), data science, and cloud computing. Prof. Tolba is a Senior Member of IEEE.

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Abstract

Smart cities, as a typical application in the field of the Internet of Things, can combine cloud computing to realize the intelligent control of objects and process massive data. While cloud computing brings convenience to smart city services, a serious problem is ensuring that confidential data cannot be leaked to malicious adversaries. Considering the security and privacy of data, data owners transmit sensitive data in its encrypted form to cloud server, which seriously hinders the improvements of potential utilization and eﬃcient sharing. Public key searchable encryption ensures that users can securely retrieve the encrypted data without decryption. However, most existing schemes cannot resist keyword guessing attacks or the size of trapdoors linearly increases with the number of data owners. In this work, by utilizing certificateless encryption and proxy re-encryption, we design an authenticated searchable encryption scheme with constant trapdoors. The designed scheme preserves the privacy of index ciphertexts and keyword trapdoors, and can resist keyword guessing attacks. In addition, data users can generate and upload trapdoors with lower computation and communication overheads. We show that the proposed scheme is suitable for smart city implementations and applications by experimentally evaluating its performance.

Keywords

Smart city / Data retrieval / Privacy protection / Certificateless cryptography

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Hongjun Li, Debiao He, P. Vijayakumar, Fayez Alqahtani, Amr Tolba. A certificateless and KGA-secure searchable encryption scheme with constant trapdoors in smart city^✩. , 2026, 12(1): 198-209 DOI:10.1016/j.dcan.2024.08.005

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CRediT authorship contribution statement

Hongjun Li: Writing-original draft, Methodology. Debiao He: Writing-review & editing, Supervision, Funding acquisition. P. Vi-jayakumar: Writing-review & editing, Validation. Fayez Alqahtani: Validation, Formal analysis. Amr Tolba: Visualization, Software, Inves-tigation.

Declaration of competing interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Data availability

The data used to support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon request.

Acknowledgements

The work was supported by the Shandong Provincial Key Research and Development Program (No. 2021CXGC010107), the National Nat-ural Science Foundation of China (Nos. U21A20466, 62325209), the New 20 Project of Higher Education of Jinan (No. 202228017), the Spe-cial Project on Science and Technology Program of Hubei Province (No. 2021BAA025), the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Univer-sities (Nos. 2042023kf0203, 20420241013) and the Researchers Sup-porting Project Number (RSP2024R509), King Saud University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

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