GridSE: Towards Practical Secure Geographic Search via Prefix Symmetric Searchable Encryption

The proliferation of location-based services and applications has brought significant attention to data and location privacy. While general secure computation and privacy-enhancing techniques can partially address this problem, one outstanding challenge is to provide near latency-free search and compatibility with mainstream geographic search techniques, especially the Discrete Global Grid Systems (DGGS). This paper proposes a new construction, namely GridSE, for efficient and DGGS-compatible Secure Geographic Search (SGS) with both backward and forward privacy. We first formulate the notion of a semantic-secure primitive called symmetric prefix predicate encryption (SP²E), for predicting whether or not a keyword contains a given prefix, and provide a construction. Then we extend SP²E for dynamic prefix symmetric searchable encryption (pSSE), namely GridSE, which supports both backward and forward privacy. GridSE only uses lightweight primitives including cryptographic hash and XOR operations and is extremely efficient. Furthermore, we provide a generic pSSE framework that enables prefix search for traditional dynamic SSE that supports only full keyword search. Experimental results over real-world geographic databases of sizes (by the number of entries) from 10^3 to 10^7 and mainstream DGGS techniques show that GridSE achieves a speedup of 150x - 5000x on search latency and a saving of 99% on communication overhead as compared to the state-of-the-art. Interestingly, even compared to plaintext search, GridSE introduces only 1.4x extra computational cost and 0.9x additional communication cost. Source code of our scheme is available at https://github.com/rykieguo1771/GridSE-RAM.