Secure attribute-based data sharing for resource-limited users in cloud computing

Abstract

Data sharing becomes an exceptionally attractive service supplied by cloud computing platforms because of its convenience and economy. As a potential technique for realizing fine-grained data sharing, attribute-based encryption (ABE) has drawn wide attentions. However, most of the existing ABE solutions suffer from the disadvantages of high computation overhead and weak data security, which has severely impeded resource-constrained mobile devices to customize the service. The problem of simultaneously achieving fine-grainedness, high-efficiency on the data owner's side, and standard data confidentiality of cloud data sharing actually still remains unresolved. This paper addresses this challenging issue by proposing a new attribute-based data sharing scheme suitable for resource-limited mobile users in cloud computing. The proposed scheme eliminates a majority of the computation task by adding system public parameters besides moving partial encryption computation offline. In addition, a public ciphertext test phase is performed before the decryption phase, which eliminates most of computation overhead due to illegitimate ciphertexts. For the sake of data security, a Chameleon hash function is used to generate an immediate ciphertext, which will be blinded by the offline ciphertexts to obtain the final online ciphertexts. The proposed scheme is proven secure against adaptively chosen-ciphertext attacks, which is widely recognized as a standard security notion. Extensive performance analysis indicates that the proposed scheme is secure and efficient.