An Efficient and Privacy Preserving CP-ABE Scheme for Internet-Based Collaboration

Abstract

The development of Internet applications facilitates enterprises and individuals to share information and work together across physical barriers. In such environment, flexible and efficient data-protection methods are required because data are out of the control domain of its owners. By encrypting with an access policy, ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption (CP-ABE) can simultaneously achieve data encryption and access control, making it an ideal mechanism for data protection in Internet-based environments. However, the existing CP-ABE schemes usually have limitations regarding efficiency and privacy leakage from the access policy. In this paper, we propose a CP-ABE scheme with hidden access policy and fast decryption that improves the decryption efficiency and preserves the privacy of the access policy. In addition, by adopting dual-system encryption methodology, our scheme achieves full security, which is a higher security level in CP-ABE. The performance analysis revealed that the comprehensive capability of our scheme outperforms the existing CP-ABE schemes.