Searching substrings inside an encrypted stream of data ... without decrypting !

Outsourcing IT services has become very common worldwide for multiple reasons ranging from costs reduction to improved services. Whatever the actual reason is, the concrete consequence for the company that delegates such services is that a third party ends up with its data in clear because of the well-known limitations of standard encryption. Ideally, this third party should only learn the minimal information necessary for performing the requested processing, which has motivated the design of countless encryption schemes compatible with specific processing. Such schemes belong to the realm of functional encryption, where the third party recovers a function f(x) from an encryption of x without learning anything else about x, with minimal interaction. Of course, the function f, and hence the encryption scheme, strongly depends on the considered application, which explains the profusion of papers related to this topic. We will focus on the possibility to allow a third party to search the presence of chosen substrings of different lengths (and more !) at any position in the encryption of a stream of data. After an introduction to this problematic and to the associated security notion, we will take a look at the proof of security of one specific construction.