SEEK: Secure and Efficient Encrypted Keyword Search For Privacy-Preserving Messaging Protocols

Abstract

Encrypted communication protects sensitive user data but can facilitate harmful or unlawful exchanges, creating a trade-off between detecting dangerous messages and preserving end-user privacy. To address this, we propose SEEK, a practical and efficient encrypted keyword-search protocol for privacy-preserving messaging that combines homomorphic encryption with secure two-party computation (2PC). SEEK first partitions messages into ciphertext fragments with the minimum sufficient overlap, then homomorphically correlates them using encrypted keyword trapdoors. For long messages, this design can reduce sender-side encryption and upload overhead by up to two orders of magnitude over state-of-the-art baselines. It supports ASCII case-insensitive matching with one fixed-size encrypted trapdoor and one homomorphic multiplication per fragment, yielding up to 5.47x faster correlation computation than the strongest fragmentation-based baselines. SEEK then invokes 2PC-based selected decoding, blinded zero testing, and secure aggregation, revealing only the keyword presence-or-absence bit while hiding the keyword, its length, message contents, match counts, and locations. SEEK achieves 100% accuracy under case variations that result in exact-matching failures, without requiring additional trapdoors or online communication. We further realize SEEK as an end-to-end web and cross-platform mobile application. Prototype evaluation on a weekly messaging history yields an online computation time of 1.92 s per search, demonstrating the practical feasibility and efficiency of SEEK.