Secure Keyword Search and Data Sharing Mechanism for Cloud Computing

In this paper, we study the problem of secure integrating public key encryption with keyword search (PEKS) with public key data encryption (PKE). We argue the previous security model is not complete regarding keyword privacy and the previous constructions are secure only in the random oracle model. We solve these problems by first defining a new security model, then give a generic construction which is secure in the new security model without random oracles. Our construction is based on secure PEKS and tag-KEM/DEM schemes and achieves modular design. We also give some applications and extensions for our construction. For example, instantiate our construction with proper components, we have a concrete scheme without random oracles, whose performance is even competitive to the previous schemes with random oracles.

Attribute-based encryption (ABE) is suitable for mobile cloud storage to protect data confidentiality and realize fine-grained data access control. It is essential for ABE schemes to achieve attribute revocation as users’ attributes may be changed frequently. Keyword search over encrypted data also needs to be solved in the mobile cloud storage. In addition, computational efficiency is a consideration for the resource-constrained mobile device. Focusing on the above-mentioned problems, an efficiently revocable and searchable ABE (RSABE) scheme for the mobile cloud storage is proposed. In our scheme, the function of attribute revocation is efficiently achieved by delegating the update of secret key and ciphertext to the powerful cloud server. Keyword search is also supported, in which data owners and users can generate the keywords index and search trapdoor, respectively, without relying on always online trusted authority. Furthermore, an outsourced decryption technology is used to reduce the computational load of decryption on user side. Our RSABE scheme is proven to be semantically secure against selective ciphertext policy and chosen plaintext attack, and to be secure against chosen keyword attack in the random oracle model. Finally, performance evaluation demonstrates that our scheme is highly efficient.

The concept of policy-based cryptography is a promising paradigm for trust establishment and authorization in largescale open environments like the Internet and Mobile Networks. It aims at providing a framework for performing cryptographic operations with respect to policies formalized as monotone Boolean expressions written in standard normal forms. A policy involves conjunctions and disjunctions of conditions where each condition is fulfilled by a digital credential representing the signature of a specific credential issuer on a set of statements about a certain entity. Therefore, an entity fulfills a policy if any only if it has been issued a set of credentials fulfilling the combination of conditions specified by the policy.In this work, we focus on policy-based encryption schemes which allow to encrypt a message according to a policy so that only entities fulfilling the policy are able to decrypt the message. More generally, policy-based encryption belongs to an emerging family of encryption schemes sharing the ability to integrate encryption with access control structures. This ability is mainly enabled by bilinear pairings over elliptic curves and allows for several interesting applications in different contexts.A policy-based encryption scheme has to fulfill two primary requirements: on one hand, provable security under well defined attack models. On the other hand, efficiency, especially when dealing with the conjunctions and disjunctions of credential-based conditions.The contributions of our research work are twofold:1. The standard acceptable notion of security for public-key encryption schemes is indistinguishability against chosen ciphertext attacks. Hence, it is natural to require that a policy-based encryption scheme also satisfies this strong notion of security. However, the definition of this security notion must be adapted to the policy-based setting. Our first contribution is the definition of policy-oriented security model for policy-based encryption schemes as well as the development of an efficient policy-based encryption scheme that is provably secure under our security model in the random oracle model.2. Policy-based encryption schemes may suffer from the key-escrow property i.e. in addition to the legitimate holder of the credentials fulfilling the encryption policy, any collusion of credential issuers who are able to issue a set of credentials fulfilling the policy can decrypt the message. Our second contribution is to address this issue through the notion of policy-based public-key encryption. The latter allows encrypting a message not only with respect to a policy but also according to a public-key so that only an entity fulfilling the policy and having access to the corresponding private-key is able to decrypt the message. We developed a policy-based public-key encryption scheme from bilinear pairings and proved its security under the corresponding security model. Our proposal improves related work in terms of both security and efficiency.

Proxy re-encryption with keyword search

Notes on a provably-secure certificate-based encryption against malicious CA attacks

Searchable public key encryption enables a storage server to retrieve the publicly encrypted data without revealing the original data contents. It offers a perfect cryptographic solution to encrypted data retrieval in encrypted data storage systems. Certificateless cryptography (CLC) is a novel cryptographic primitive that has many merits. It overcomes the key escrow problem in identity-based cryptosystems and the cumbersome certificate problem in conventional public key cryptosystems. Motivated by the appealing features of CLC, three certificateless encryption with keyword search (CLEKS) schemes were presented in the literature. However, all of them were constructed with the costly bilinear pairing and thus are not suitable for the devices that have limited computing resources and battery power. So, it is interesting and worthwhile to design a CLEKS scheme without using bilinear pairing. In this study, we put forward a pairing-free CLEKS scheme that does not exploit bilinear pairing. We strictly prove that the scheme achieves keyword ciphertext indistinguishability against adaptive chosen-keyword attacks under the complexity assumption of the computational Diffie-Hellman problem in the random oracle model. Efficiency comparison and the simulation show that it enjoys better performance than the previous pairing-based CLEKS schemes. In addition, we briefly introduce three extensions of the proposed CLEKS scheme.

Certificateless cryptography (CL-PKC) is a concept that aims at enjoying the advantages of identity based cryptography without suffering from its inherent key escrow. Several methods were recently suggested to generically construct a certificateless encryption (CLE) scheme by combining identity based schemes with ordinary public key cryptosystems. Whilst the security of one of these generic compositions was proved in a relaxed security model, we show that all them are insecure against chosen-ciphertext attacks in the strongest model of Al-Riyami and Paterson. We show how to easily fix these problems and give a method to achieve generic CLE constructions which are provably CCA-secure in the random oracle model. We finally propose a new efficient pairing-based scheme that performs better than previous proposals without pre-computation. We also prove its security in the random oracle model.

Condition proxy re-encryption is a promising security primitive for pervasive data sharing in such settings as cloud-based social networks and collaborations. However, it is challenging to create a secure condition proxy re-encryption scheme that is applicable for circumstances with multiple conditions. Based on secret sharing, Lan et al. proposed a conditional proxy re-encryption scheme that can support "AND" and "OR" gates over multiple conditions, and claimed that the scheme is secure against Chosen-Ciphertext Attack (CCA) in the random oracle model. However, by giving two concrete attacks, we show that their scheme is not CCA secure and even not secure against Chosen-Plaintext Attack (CPA) under their defined security model. Furthermore, we analyze why the scheme cannot satisfy the security mentioned above.

Scalable CCA-secure public-key authenticated encryption with keyword search from ideal lattices in cloud computing

Threshold Public Key Encryption allows a set of servers to decrypt a cipher text if a given threshold of authorized servers cooperate. Forward security allows one to mitigate the damage caused by exposure of secret keys. Forward-secure public encryptions are used to the threshold setting, this model guarantees that even if an adversary have broken into more than t distinct servers(for some i), messages encrypted during all time periods prior to i remain secret. In this paper, we present the first probably secure (non-interactive) forward-secure threshold public-key encryption scheme against chosen-cipher text attacks in the random oracle model. The encryption and update operations are very efficient when compared with the scheme presented by Libert et al. A formal definition, as well as a detailed analysis of the security performance of this scheme, is presented. The security of this scheme is based on the Computational Bilinear Diffie Hellman assumption, which leads to a unique approach to prove security in the random oracle model. Furthermore, in our model, the servers update their keys individually and asynchronously, without any communication between them.

Selective opening (SO) security is one of the most important securities of public key encryption (PKE) in a multi-user setting. Even though messages and random coins used in some ciphertexts are leaked, SO security guarantees the confidentiality of the other ciphertexts. Actually, it is shown that there exist PKE schemes which meet the standard security such as indistinguishability against chosen ciphertext attacks (IND-CCA security) but do not meet SO security against chosen ciphertext attacks. Hence, it is important to consider SO security in the multi-user setting. On the other hand, many researchers have studied cryptosystems in the security model where adversaries can submit quantum superposition queries (i.e., quantum queries) to oracles. In particular, IND-CCA secure PKE and KEM schemes in the quantum random oracle model have been intensively studied so far.

Semantic security against chosen-ciphertext attacks (INDCCA) is widely believed as the correct security level for public-key encryption scheme. On the other hand, it is often dangerous to give to only one people the power of decryption. Therefore, threshold cryptosystems aimed at distributing the decryption ability. However, only two efficient such schemes have been proposed so far for achieving IND-CCA. Both are El Gamal-like schemes and thus are based on the same intractability assumption, namely the Decisional Diffie-Hellman problem. In this article we rehabilitate the twin-encryption paradigm proposed by Naor and Yung to present generic conversions from a large family of (threshold) IND-CPA scheme into a (threshold) IND-CCA one in the random oracle model. An efficient instantiation is also proposed, which is based on the Paillier cryptosystem. This new construction provides the first example of threshold cryptosystem secure against chosen-ciphertext attacks based on the factorization problem. Moreover, this construction provides a scheme where the properties of the original scheme still hold. This is rather cumbersome because homomorphic cryptosystems are known to be malleable and therefore not to be CCA secure. However, we do not build a cryptosystem, but just keep the homomorphic properties.

We define new algorithmic problems and discuss their properties (in particular, we present a careful study of their computational complexity). We apply the new problems to design public key encryption protocols with semantic security relative to their decisional variants. We then show how to provide efficient schemes that are semantically secure under adaptive chosen ciphertext attacks in the random oracle model. Finally, we show that the ideas developed in this extended abstract can be used to design the most efficient known cryptosystem with semantic security under non-adaptive chosen ciphertext attacks in the standard security model.

As cloud computing becomes prevalent, more and more data owners are likely to outsource their data to a cloud server. However, to ensure privacy, the data should be encrypted before outsourcing. Symmetric searchable encryption allows users to retrieve keyword over encrypted data without decrypting the data. Many existing schemes that are based on symmetric searchable encryption only support single keyword search, conjunctive keywords search, multiple keywords search, or single phrase search. However, some schemes, i.e., static schemes, only search one phrase in a query request. In this paper, we propose a multi-phrase ranked search over encrypted cloud data, which also supports dynamic update operations, such as adding or deleting files. We used an inverted index to record the locations of keywords and to judge whether the phrase appears. This index can search for keywords efficiently. In order to rank the results and protect the privacy of relevance score, the relevance score evaluation model is used in searching process on client-side. Also, the special construction of the index makes the scheme dynamic. The data owner can update the cloud data at very little cost. Security analyses and extensive experiments were conducted to demonstrate the safety and efficiency of the proposed scheme.

In this paper, we formally prove that padding the plaintext with a random bit-string provides the semantic security against chosen plaintext attack (IND-CPA) for the McEliece (and its dual, the Niederreiter) cryptosystems under the standard assumptions. Such padding has recently been used by Suzuki, Kobara and Imai in the context of RFID security. Our proof relies on the technical result by Katz and Shin from Eurocrypt '05 showing "pseudorandomness" implied by the learning parity with noise (LPN) problem. We do not need the random oracles as opposed to the known generic constructions which, on the other hand, provide a stronger protection as compared to our scheme--against (adaptive) chosen ciphertext attack, i.e., IND-CCA(2). In order to show that the padded version of the cryptosystem remains practical, we provide some estimates for suitable key sizes together with corresponding workload required for successful attack.