Secured Access Policy in Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-Based Encryption for Cloud Environment

Abstract

The cloud allows clients to store and share data. Depending on the user’s needs, it is imperative to design an effective access control plan to share the information only with approved users. The user loses control of their data when the data is outsourced to the cloud. Therefore, access control mechanisms will become a significant challenging problem. The Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-Based Encryption (CP-ABE) is an essential solution in which the user can control data access. CP-ABE encrypts the data under a limited access policy after the user sets some access policies. The user can decrypt the data if they satisfy the limited access policy. Although CP-ABE is an effective access control program, the privacy of the policy might be compromised by the attackers. Namely, the attackers can gather important information from plain text policy. To address this issue, the SHA-512 algorithm is presented to create a hash code for the user’s attributes in this paper. Depending on the created hash codes, an access policy will be formed. It leads to protecting the access policy against attacks. The effectiveness of the proposed scheme is assessed based on decryption time, private key generation time, ciphertext generation time, and data verification time.