An Expressive, Lightweight and Secure Construction of Key Policy Attribute-Based Cloud Data Sharing Access Control

Abstract

Attribute-based encryption (ABE) is an interesting cryptographic technique for flexible cloud data sharing access control. However, some open challenges hinder its practical application. In previous schemes, all attributes are considered as in the same status while they are not in most of practical scenarios. Meanwhile, the size of access policy increases dramatically with the raise of its expressiveness complexity. In addition, current research hardly notices that mobile front-end devices, such as smartphones, are poor in computational performance while too much bilinear pairing computation is needed for ABE. In this paper, we propose a key-policy weighted attribute-based encryption without bilinear pairing computation (KP-WABE-WB) for secure cloud data sharing access control. A simple weighted mechanism is presented to describe different importance of each attribute. We introduce a novel construction of ABE without executing any bilinear pairing computation. Compared to previous schemes, our scheme has a better performance in expressiveness of access policy and computational efficiency.