Black‐Box and Public Traceability in Multi‐authority Attribute Based Encryption

Abstract

Ciphertext-policy Attribute-based encryption (CP-ABE) is a promising tool for implementing finegrained cryptographic access control. While the uniqueness of generating private keys brings extra security issues. The key escrow is inherent in CP-ABE systems because the trusted authority has the power to decrypt every ciphertext. The private keys are only associated with the attributes nor the user's identity. Some malicious users might be tempted to leak their decryption privileges for financial gain without the risk of being caught as the decryption privilege could be shared by multiple users who own the same set of attributes. We propose a new multiauthority CP-ABE with blackbox and public traceability, where the private keys are assigned by the cooperation between one central authority and multi-authorities. The performance and security analyses indicate that the proposed scheme is highly efficient and provably secure under the security model.