Constant-Size Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-Based Data Access and Outsourceable Decryption Scheme

Changhee Hahn, Junbeom Hur

http://doi.org/

Sharing data by multiple users on the public storage, e.g., the cloud, is considered to be efficient because the cloud provides on-demand computing service at anytime and anywhere. Secure data sharing is achieved by fine-grained access control. Existing symmetric and public key encryption schemes are not suitable for secure data sharing because they support 1-to-1 relationship between a ciphertext and a secret key. Attribute based encryption supports fine-grained access control, however it incurs linearly increasing ciphertexts as the number of attributes increases. Additionally, the decryption process has high computational cost so that it is not applicable in case of resource-constrained environments. In this study, we propose an efficient attribute-based secure data sharing scheme with outsourceable decryption. The proposed scheme guarantees constant-size ciphertexts irrespective of the number of attributes. In case of static attributes, the computation cost to the user is reduced by delegating approximately 95.3% of decryption operations to the more powerful storage systems, whereas 72.3% of decryption operations are outsourced in terms of dynamic attributes.