Fully Secure Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-Based Encryption in Prime Order Group

Lattice-based Attribute-based encryption is a well-known cryptographic mechanism that can resist quantum attacks and has the ability of fine-grained access control, and it has a wide range of application scenarios in current Internet of Thing (IoT) era. However, lack of efficiency and existing the problem of large ciphertext expansion rate are the main disadvantages impede the applications of this mechanism. Thus, we propose an efficient and practical ciphertext policy attribute-based encryption (CP-ABE) scheme from lattices in the paper. In this scheme, to make the secret key reusable, we adjust access tree and propose a basic access tree structure, which can be converted from disjunctive normal form, and combine it with a light post-quantum scheme of Kyber. In addition, the compression method and plaintext expansion method are introduced to optimize the scheme. Our CP-ABE scheme is secure against chosen plaintext attack under the hardness of module learning with errors problem. We implement our scheme and compare it with three recent related schemes in terms of security, function and communication cost. Experiments and comparisons show that our CP-ABE scheme has advantages in high encryption efficiency, small matrix dimension, small key sizes, and low ciphertext expansion rate, which has some merit in practice.

We present a new encoding framework for predicate encryption (PE) in prime order groups. Our framework captures a broader range of adaptively secure PE schemes by allowing PE schemes to have more flexible (i.e., non-linear) structures. The existing works dealing with adaptively secure PE schemes in prime order groups require strict structural restrictions on PE schemes. In particular, the exponents of public keys and master secret keys of the PE schemes, which are referred to as common variables, must be linear. In this paper, we introduce a modular approach which includes non-linear common variables in PE schemes. First, we formalize non-linear structures by improving Attrapadung’s pair encoding framework (Eurocrypt’14). Then, we provide a generic compiler that incorporates encodings under our framework to PE schemes in prime order groups. Notably, we prove the security of our compiler by introducing a new technique that decomposes common variables into two types and makes one of them shared between semi-functional and normal spaces on processes of the dual system encryption. As instances of our new framework, we introduce new attribute-based encryption schemes supporting non-monotone access structures, namely non-monotonic ABE. Our new schemes are adaptively secure in prime order groups and have either short ciphertexts (in the case of KP-ABE) or short keys (in the case of CP-ABE).

Pairing-based CP-ABE with constant-size ciphertexts and secret keys for cloud environment

A Review on Data Privacy using Attribute-Based Encryption

Nowadays, many organizations are adopting cloud computing for storing the large amount of organization’s important and private data. Here, it becomes important to mange appropriate access rights to these data as it is stored outside the organization’s boundary and is handled by the third party service providers. The Ciphertext Policy Attribute-based Encryption (CPABE) scheme is the most widely utilized technique that offers encrypted access control. In the existing implementations of CPABE scheme, one of the significant issues that need to be addressed is an efficient revocation mechanism. In this paper a direct and immediate user revocation approach for CPABE scheme is presented. The proposed method offers direct user revocation by maintaining the revocation list and to keep revocation list smaller the validity time is embedded in the user’s secret key. The revoked users are still able to access the previously generated ciphertexts. Hence, ciphertext update process is incorporated and a separate immediate revocation list is maintained so that the revoked users’ access is restricted. Also, in the proposed system the revocation information is embedded in ciphertext as a separate part so the update process of ciphertext is more efficient.KeywordsAttributesRevocationABECPABERevocation listValidity periodCloudAccess structure

Cryptographic cloud storage (CCS) is a secure architecture built in the upper layer of a public cloud infrastructure. In the CCS system, a user can define and manage the access control of the data by himself without the help of cloud storage service provider. The ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption (CP-ABE) is considered as the critical technology to implement such access control. However, there still exists a large security obstacle to the implementation of CP-ABE in CCS. That is, how to identify the malicious cloud user who illegally shares his private keys with others or applies his keys to construct a decryption device/black-box, and provides the decryption service. Although several CP-ABE schemes with black-box traceability have been proposed to address the problem, most of them are not practical in CCS systems, due to the absence of scalability and expensive computation cost, especially the cost of tracing. Thus, we present a new black-box traceable CP-ABE scheme that is scalable and high efficient. To achieve a much better performance, our work is designed on the prime order bilinear groups that results in a great improvement in the efficiency of group operations, and the cost of tracing is reduced greatly to O ( N ) or O ( 1 ) , where N is the number of users of a system. Furthermore, our scheme is proved secure in a selective standard model. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first such practical and provably secure CP-ABE scheme for CCS, which is black-box traceable.

Attribute-based encryption schemes with constant-size ciphertexts

Attribute-based encryption (ABE) for cloud computing access control is reviewed in this article. A taxonomy and comprehensive assessment criteria of ABE are first proposed. In the taxonomy, ABE schemes are assorted into key-policy ABE (KP-ABE) schemes, ciphertext-policy ABE (CP-ABE) schemes, anti-quantum ABE schemes, and generic constructions. In accordance with cryptographically functional features, CP-ABE is further divided into nine subcategories with regard to basic functionality, revocation, accountability, policy hiding, policy updating, multi-authority, hierarchy, offline computation, and outsourced computation. In addition, a systematical methodology for discussing and comparing existing ABE schemes is proposed. For KP-ABE and each type of CP-ABE, the corresponding access control scenario is presented and explained by concrete examples. Specifically, the syntax of ABE is given followed by the adversarial model and security goals. ABE schemes are discussed according to the design strategies and special features and are compared in the light of the proposed assessment criteria with respect to security and performance. Compared to related state-of-the-art survey papers, this article not only provides a broader 12 categories of ABE schemes, but also makes a more comprehensive and holistic comparison. Finally, a number of open research challenges in ABE are pointed out.

Traceable multi-authority ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption (CP-ABE) is a practical encryption method that can achieve user traceability and fine-grained access control simultaneously. However, existing traceable multi-authority CP-ABE schemes have two main limitations that prevent them from practical applications. First, these schemes only support small universe: the attributes must be fixed at system setup and the attribute space is restricted to polynomial size. Second, the schemes are either less expressive (the access policy is limited to “AND gates with wildcard) or inefficient (the system is constructed in composite order bilinear groups). To address these limitations, we present a traceable large universe multi-authority CP-ABE scheme, and further prove that it is statically secure in the random oracle model. Compared with existing traceable multi-authority CP-ABE schemes, the proposed scheme has four advantages. First, the attributes are not fixed at setup and the attribute universe is not bounded to polynomial size. Second, the ciphertext polices can be expressed as any monotone access structures. Third, the proposed scheme is constructed in prime order groups, which makes this scheme more efficient than those in composite order bilinear groups. Finally, the proposed scheme requires neither a central authority nor an identity table for tracing.

In multi‐authority attribute‐based encryption (ABE) systems, each authority manages a different attribute universe and issues the private keys to users. However, the previous multi‐authority ABE schemes are subject to such restrictions during initializing the systems: either the attribute universe is polynomially sized and the attributes have to be enumerated or the attribute universe can be exponentially large, but the size of the set of attributes, which will be used in encryption, is not more than a predefined fixed value. These restrictions prevent multi‐authority ABE schemes from being deployed in dynamic practice applications. In this paper, we present a large universe decentralized key‐policy ABE scheme without such additional limitation. In our scheme, there is no requirement of any central authority. Each attribute authority executes independently from the others and can join or depart the system allodiality. Our system supports any monotone access policy. The proposed scheme is constructed on prime order groups and proved selectively secure in the standard model. To the best of our knowledge, our scheme is the first large universe decentralized key‐policy ABE system in the standard model. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

In this work, an oblivious transfer with complex access control scheme that is constructed based on ciphertext policy attribute based encryption (CP-ABE) scheme is proposed. In this scheme, the database server can enforce fine grained access control for each record where the authorized user is allowed to access, but the unauthorized user cannot, whereas it learns neither which record a user accesses, nor which attributes a user has. This scheme has the advantages as follows: First, it allows the expressive access control policies where access structures are based on linear secret sharing scheme that directly supports AND, OR and Threshold gates. Second, the communication complexity in this scheme is constant in the numbers of records which have been accessed. Third, this scheme is constructed in prime order bilinear group. Fourth, this scheme is secure in the standard model. To the best of our knowledge, this scheme is the first to obtain these features simultaneously.

Electronic health record (EHR) stores not only the patient’s health-related data but also the sensitive individual information. Consequently, data security and access privacy are the greatest concern of EHR applications while sharing the data through the cloud. Ciphertext policy attribute-based encryption (CP-ABE) is one of the popular one-to-many encryption schemes, which helps to attain fine-grained access control in cloud domain. In CP-ABE, since the access policy is attached to the ciphertext, anyone with the ciphertext can see the data owner’s policy that may cause privacy leakage. In this paper, we proposed a CP-ABE cryptosystem that supports access policy obfuscation and outsourced decryption enabling efficient and secure operations in cloud environment. Linear secret sharing (LSS) scheme is used for supporting any monotonic access structures, thereby improving the access policy’s expressiveness. We have incorporated prime-order bilinear group and matrix-based LSS scheme that increases the computational efficiency of the cryptosystem. Finally, we have evaluated the performance of our CP-ABE cryptosystem using practical implementation utilizing Charm framework.

A promising solution to protect data privacy in cloud storage services is known as ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption CP-ABE. However, in a traditional CP-ABE scheme, a ciphertext is bound with an explicit access structure, which may leak private information about the underlying plaintext in that anyone having access to the ciphertexts can tell the attributes of the privileged recipients by looking at the access structures. A notion called CP-ABE with partially hidden access structures [14, 15, 18, 19, 24] was put forth to address this problem, in which each attribute consists of an attribute name and an attribute value and the specific attribute values of an access structure are hidden in the ciphertext. However, previous CP-ABE schemes with partially hidden access structures only support access structures in AND gates, whereas a few other schemes supporting expressive access structures are computationally inefficient since they are built from bilinear pairings over the composite-order groups. In this paper, we focus on addressing this problem, and present an expressive CP-ABE scheme with partially hidden access structures in prime-order groups.

Distributed key generation (DKG) is widely used in multi-party computation and decentralized applications. DKG has two phases, namely sharing and reconstruction. Most of the prior DKG protocols need at least 2 rounds for the sharing phase, in case some party raises a dispute. The existing 1-round DKG protocol [Fouque <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">et al.</i> , PKC’01], built based on a publicly verifiable secret sharing (PVSS) scheme, assumes a static adversary model and its reconstruction phase requires <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$O(n^{2})$ </tex-math></inline-formula> communication complexity. Motivated by the observation that a ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption (CP-ABE) scheme hides secret sharing (SS) in ciphertext, we utilize decentralized CP-ABE to achieve the first adaptively secure 1-round DKG protocol. Firstly, a CP-ABE scheme enables the ciphertexts in DKG to be externally decrypted, making our protocol superior to the PVSS-based DKG protocol in reconstruction. The communication and computation complexities are both lowered to <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$O(n)$ </tex-math></inline-formula> thanks to the constant-sized decryption key and the proposed batch decryption. The use of CP-ABE also makes our DKG protocol storage-friendly, i.e., the parties store no ciphertext after the sharing phase. Secondly, we add non-interactive zero-knowledge (NIZK) proofs to make the CP-ABE ciphertext publicly verifiable by leveraging the sigma protocol and the Fiat-Shamir heuristic. Thirdly, we demonstrate our protocol’s feasibility by presenting a proof-of-concept implementation over Ethereum, which is used as a public channel and a trustworthy computation platform. The implementation is a non-trivial task due to Ethereum’s incompatibility with the bilinear mapping group.

In a ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption (CP-ABE) scheme, a user may have multiple attributes, and each attribute may be shared simultaneously by many users. The decryption key of an attribute can thus be shared by many users who all possess the attribute. For monetary gain, a malicious authorized user may reveal his/her decryption key to a third party, and it is difficult to trace the owner of primitive secret key from an exposed key. At the same time, this situation may also limit commercial applications of CP-ABE systems. To solve these problems and enable fine-grained access control for the encrypted data, we propose a traceable CP-ABE scheme with attribute-level user revocation for cloud storage (TUR-CPABE). Our scheme enjoys four advantages. First, it has the ability to trace malicious users who have leaked key information from the system. Second, it supports attribute-level user revocation for malicious users and allows ABE fine-grained access control. Third, it allows secret key updates and ciphertext updates to resist collusion attacks between users. Fourth, outsourcing encryption, decryption and attribute revocation are used to reduce the computational burden on data owners, data users and the trust authority, respectively. In addition, our scheme has been proven to be secure against chosen plaintext attacks under a selective access policy based on decisional q – BDHE assumption in the standard model.