ABSTRACT The integration of the industrial Internet of things (IIoT) is accelerating the digital and intelligent transformation of various industries. However, ensuring data confidentiality while supporting efficient data retrieval remains a significant challenge in this evolving landscape. Public key encryption with keyword search (PEKS) has emerged as a promising solution to address these issues. However, many existing PEKS schemes are vulnerable to frequency analysis attacks, where adversaries can infer sensitive keyword information from user generated trapdoors, posing a serious threat to data privacy. We construct a novel lightweight certificateless public key authentication with keyword search encryption (CPAEKS) scheme specifically designed for IIoT scenarios in this paper, and provide a formal security proof. Our design counters frequency analysis attacks effectively and eliminates the issues of key escrow and certificate management. Additionally, we present a lightweight scheme that removes the dependency on computationally expensive bilinear pairings and makes the solution more suitable for IIoT environments with limited computational resources. The CPAEKS scheme is evaluated through comparison with previous schemes in terms of functionality and performance. Performance evaluation reveals that our scheme outperforms traditional bilinear‐pairing‐based PAEKS schemes in terms of overall performance, thereby enhancing its applicability in resource‐constrained IIoT environments.
Liu et al. (Thu,) studied this question.