Abstract—As cloud storage becomes widely used, sensitive data is usually required to be encrypted before stored in the cloud. Searchable encryption schemes provide an important mechanism to cryptographically protect data and make it available to be searched and accessed. Predicate encryption, a recently developed cryptographic primitive, offers a new solution to search on encrypted data and fine-grained access control over the encrypted data. It makes ciphertext related to the attribute and user's secret key and token associated with the predicate. This paper reviews the development of provably secure schemes and some states of the most recent researches. There remain open problems in before works like security issues and lacking of efficiency, which guides us to the future directions.

Index Terms—Predicate encryption, cloud storage, access control, data security

Cite: Liang Hu, Yuanmo Zhang, Hongtu Li, Yicheng Yu, Fangming Wu, and Jianfeng Chu, "Challenges and Trends on Predicate Encryption—A Better Searchable Encryption in Cloud," Journal of Communications, vol. 9, no. 12, pp. 908-915, 2014. Doi: 10.12720/jcm.9.12.908-915