PPSEB: A Postquantum Public-Key Searchable Encryption Scheme on Blockchain for E-Healthcare Scenarios

In the current E-healthcare scenarios, medical institutions are used to encrypt the information and store it in an Electronic Health Record (EHR) system in order to ensure the privacy of medical information. To realize data sharing, a Public-key Encryption with Keyword Search (PEKS) scheme is indispensable, ensuring doctors search for medical information in the state of ciphertext. However, the traditional PEKS scheme cannot resist the keyword guessing quantum computing attacks, and its security depends on the confidentiality of the secret key. In addition, classical PEKS hand over the search process to a third party, affecting the search results’ accuracy. Therefore, we proposed a postquantum Public-key Searchable Encryption scheme on Blockchain (PPSEB) for E-healthcare scenarios. Firstly, we utilized a lattice-based cryptographic primitive to ensure the security of the search process and achieve forward security to avoid key leakage of medical information. Secondly, we introduced blockchain technology to solve the problem of third-party untrustworthiness in the search process. Finally, through security analysis, we prove the correctness and forward security of the solution in the E-healthcare scenarios, and the comprehensive performance evaluation demonstrates the efficiency of our scheme compared with other existing schemes.