Circuit Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-Based Hybrid Encryption with Verifiable Delegation in Cloud Computing

Abstract

In the cloud, for achieving access control and keeping data confidential, the data owners could adopt attribute-based encryption to encrypt the stored data. Users with limited computing power are however more likely to delegate the mask of the decryption task to the cloud servers to reduce the computing cost. As a result, attribute-based encryption with delegation emerges. Still, there are caveats and questions remaining in the previous relevant works. For instance, during the delegation, the cloud servers could tamper or replace the delegated ciphertext and respond a forged computing result with malicious intent. They may also cheat the eligible users by responding them that they are ineligible for the purpose of cost saving. Furthermore, during the encryption, the access policies may not be flexible enough as well. Since policy for general circuits enables to achieve the strongest form of access control, a construction for realizing circuit ciphertext-policy attribute-based hybrid encryption with verifiable delegation has been considered in our work. In such a system, combined with verifiable computation and encrypt-then-mac mechanism, the data confidentiality, the fine-grained access control and the correctness of the delegated computing results are well guaranteed at the same time. Besides, our scheme achieves security against chosen-plaintext attacks under the $k$ -multilinear Decisional Diffie-Hellman assumption. Moreover, an extensive simulation campaign confirms the feasibility and efficiency of the proposed solution.