Verifiable Semantic-Aware Ranked Keyword Search in Cloud-Assisted Edge Computing

Ranked keyword search has gained Ranked keyword search has gained traction due to its attractive properties such as flexibility and accessibility. However, most existing ranked keyword search schemes ignore the semantic associations between the documents and queries. To solve this challenging issue in cloud-assisted edge computing, we first design the Semantic-aware Ranked Multi-keyword Search (SRMS) scheme by adopting the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic model and the Chinese Remainder Theorem (CRT)-based secret sharing mechanism. Considering that the cloud server may be malicious, we implement a basic verification mechanism in SRMS to verify the correctness and completeness of search results and extend this verification mechanism in cloud-assisted edge computing scenarios. Formal security analysis proves that SRMS and extended result verification mechanisms are secure in both the known ciphertext model and the known background model. Extensive experiments using the real-world dataset demonstrate that SRMS is efficient and practical.