Abstract
Recently, numerous service discovery protocols have been introduced in the open literature. Unfortunately, many of them did not consider security issues, and for those that did, many security and privacy problems still remain. One important issue is to protect the privacy of a service provider while enabling an end-user to search an alternative service using multiple keywords. To deal with this issue, the existing protocols assumed that a directory server should be trusted or owned by each service provider. However, an adversary may compromise the directory server due to its openness property.
In this paper, we suggest an efficient method of membership verification to resolve this issue and analyze its performance. Using this method, we propose a privacy-preserving secure service discovery protocol protecting the privacy of a service provider while providing multiple keywords search to an end-user. Also, we provide performance and security analysis of our protocol.