Address permutation for privacy-preserving searchable symmetric encryption

This paper proposes a privacy-preserving database encryption scheme that provides access pattern hiding against a service provider. The proposed scheme uses a session key to permute indices of database records each time they are accessed. The proposed scheme can achieve access pattern hiding in situations in which an adversary cannot access the inside of the database directly, by separating the entity with an index table and data table and permuting both the index and position where the data are stored. Moreover, it is very efficient since only O(1) server computation and communication cost are required in terms of the number of the data stored. It can be applied to cloud computing, where the intermediate entities such as cloud computing service provider can violate the privacy of users or patients.