Attribute-Based Encryption with Efficient Keyword Search and User Revocation

Abstract

Ciphertext policy attribute-based encryption (CP-ABE) is a promising cryptographic technology and a key component that enable secure data sharing in a cloud environment through fine-grained access control. Since it was introduced, many interesting schemes have been proposed. However, in addition to managing data sharing through access control, a comprehensive scheme should also cater for user revocation and ciphertext queries. This is because in a cloud environment new users may join while existing users may leave the system. At the same time, given the potentially large amount of data stored in a cloud storage, user should be able to retrieve the required files efficiently in a privacy-preserving manner. To address the above issue, in this paper, we propose a practical searchable CP-ABE scheme supporting user revocation. In contrast to existing schemes that provide only single keyword query, our efficient search function provides conjunctive search, which allows user to locate a ciphertext related to a set of keywords. The computation overhead of our user revocation is at least on par with existing schemes. Besides, the security analysis indicates that the proposed scheme is secure under the decisional Bilinear Diffie-Hellman assumption. We also provide extensive experimental results to confirm the efficiency and feasibility of our proposed construction.