Efficient and Secure Attribute-Based Access Control With Identical Sub-Policies Frequently Used in Cloud Storage

Abstract

Under the assumption of honest-but-curious cloud service provider, various cryptographic techniques have been used to address the issues of data access control and confidentiality in public cloud storage. Among which, attribute-based encryption (ABE) has been shown to be an attractive scheme. Although the technique of ABE brings in various benefits, its onerous overhead should not be ignored. In this article, based on an improved LSSS (linear secret sharing scheme) matrix expression integrated in CP-ABE (Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-Based Encryption) algorithm, we present an efficient and secure attribute-based access control scheme for the scenarios where multiple data are shared and encrypted with frequently used sub-policies. In the scheme, a user can store the parameters about a specific sub-policy in his/her first decryption, which can be reused in the subsequent data decryptions whose embedded access policies include the same sub-policy so as to significantly reduce the computation cost. Our proposed scheme is proved to be semantically secure under chosen plaintext attacks and can well preserve the confidentiality of the data sharing system. Our analysis and experimentation also show that our scheme does significantly reduce the decryption time and while trades in only very little storage overhead, and thus effectively promotes the efficiency.