Hidden policy ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption with keyword search against keyword guessing attack

Abstract

Attribute-based encryption with keyword search (ABKS) enables data owners to grant their search capabilities to other users by enforcing an access control policy over the outsourced encrypted data. However, existing ABKS schemes cannot guarantee the privacy of the access structures, which may contain some sensitive private information. Furthermore, resulting from the exposure of the access structures, ABKS schemes are susceptible to an off-line keyword guessing attack if the keyword space has a polynomial size. To solve these problems, we propose a novel primitive named hidden policy ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption with keyword search (HP-CPABKS). With our primitive, the data user is unable to search on encrypted data and learn any information about the access structure if his/her attribute credentials cannot satisfy the access control policy specified by the data owner. We present a rigorous selective security analysis of the proposed HP-CPABKS scheme, which simultaneously keeps the indistinguishability of the keywords and the access structures. Finally, the performance evaluation verifies that our proposed scheme is efficient and practical.