Equality Test Public Key Encryption with Cryptographic Reverse Firewalls for Cloud-based E-commerce

The rise of e-commerce and the adoption of cloud servers have revolutionized retail by providing greater convenience and selection to online shoppers. However, personalizing the customer experience also poses important challenges regarding privacy, security, and trust. To tackle this issue, the public key encryption with equality test (PKEET) is employed. Customer experiences are securely transmitted to the cloud server in an encrypted manner. Consequently, the cloud server is authorized to carry out an equality test on the encrypted data and retrieval without revealing private details. Edward Snowden’s disclosures underscored the risk of capable adversaries infiltrating user devices and surreptitiously accessing private information via covert backdoors. To tackle this, cryptographic reverse firewalls (CRFs) were proposed. However, applying CRF techniques to PKEET for securing personalization and contextualization in e-commerce has yet to be realized. Thus, this work introduces a novel equality test public key encryption with cryptographic reverse firewalls (ETPKE-CRF) approach. The performance evaluation demonstrates that the ET-PKE-CRF scheme substantially enhances efficiency in terms of communication and computation, outperforming current advanced solutions.