A Practical Attribute-Based Document Collection Hierarchical Encryption Scheme in Cloud Computing

Abstract

Ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption can provide fine-grained access control and secure data sharing to the data users in cloud computing. However, the encryption/decryption efficiency of existing schemes can be further improved when encrypting a large document collection. In this paper, we propose a practical Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-Based Hierarchical document collection Encryption scheme named CP-ABHE. By practical, we mean that CP-ABHE is more efficient in both computation and storage space without sacrificing data security. In CP-ABHE, we first construct a set of integrated access trees based on the documents’ attribute sets. We employ the greedy strategy to build the trees incrementally and grow the trees dynamically by combining the small ones. Then, all the documents on an integrated access tree are encrypted together. Different to existing schemes, the leaves in different access trees with the same attribute share the same secret number, which is employed to encrypt the documents. This greatly improves the performance of CP-ABHE. The security of our scheme is theoretically proved based on the decisional bilinear Diffie–Hellman assumption. The simulation results illustrate that CP-ABHE performs very well in terms of security, efficiency, and the storage size of the ciphertext.