A Searchable Symmetric Encryption (SSE) mechanism is described which allows efficient dynamic updating of encrypted index information. The encrypted index information includes pointer information that is encrypted using a malleable encryption scheme. The SSE mechanism updates the encrypted index information by modifying at least one instance of the pointer information without decrypting the pointer information, and thereby without revealing the nature of the changes being made. In one implementation, the SSE mechanism includes a main indexing structure and a deletion indexing structure. An updating operation involves patching applied to both the main indexing structure and deletion indexing structure.