Publication Type

Journal Article

Version

acceptedVersion

Publication Date

8-2026

Abstract

Searchable encryption enables writers to upload encrypted data to an untrusted cloud server, while allowing authorized readers to perform keyword searches over the encrypted content without compromising data privacy. The multi writer/multi-reader (M/M) setting better reflects real-world de ployment requirements because it aligns with the collaborative nature of many modern applications, but introduces substantial challenges in both efficiency and security. The state-of-the art scheme, delegatable searchable encryption (DSE), achieves optimal search time and forward privacy in the M/M setting. Nevertheless, DSE provides only limited security guarantees: search tokens generated by readers reveal the update count of queried keywords, and the scheme remains susceptible to collusion attacks between users and the server. In this work, we present Archon, a novel hardware-assisted multi-user searchable encryption scheme that addresses the aforementioned security limitations while maintaining sublinear search complexity. By leveraging trusted execution environments and an updatable keyword private information retrieval protocol, Archon achieves strong collusion resistance and supports flexible user revocation in multi-user settings. We implement Archon and evaluate its performance on real-world datasets to demonstrate its practical efficiency.

Keywords

Collusion Attack, Multi-Reader, Multi-Writer, Searchable Encryption, User Revocation

Discipline

Information Security

Research Areas

Cybersecurity

Publication

IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing

First Page

1

Last Page

18

ISSN

1545-5971

Identifier

10.1109/TDSC.2026.3725707

Publisher

Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers

Copyright Owner and License

Authors

Additional URL

https://doi.org/10.1109/TDSC.2026.3725707

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