Improvement of an outsourced attribute-based encryption scheme

Abstract

Attribute-based encryption (ABE) scheme has become an important technology in cryptography. However, the considerable overhead of encryption and decryption restricts its application on the devices with limited resource. Fortunately, as the development of cloud computing, someone presents that outsourcing decryption and encryption can be used to deal with the problem. This idea has drawn a lot of attention after being proposed. Recently, Li et al. put forward an efficient verifiable outsourced ABE scheme which outsources the encryption and decryption to the cloud server and enables its valid receivers to verify the correctness of the message after decrypting. However, in this paper, we prove that their scheme is not secure under chosen plaintext attack which is the basic security requirement of ABE scheme. Then, we improve their scheme and illustrate that the improved scheme is adaptive chosen ciphertext attack (CCA2) secure in the random oracle model. The final comparison shows that we do not add extra computational burden to improve the security.