Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-Based Signcryption Research Articles

Efficient and Secure Access Control for IoT-based Environmental Monitoring

Environmental monitoring devices based on IoT collect a large amount of data about the environment and our surroundings. These data are collected and processed before being uploaded to third-party servers and accessed and viewed by ordinary or specialized users. However, they may hold sensitive information that should not be exposed to unauthorized users. Therefore, accessing this sensitive information must be strictly controlled and limited in order to prevent unauthorized access. This research intends to create an access control mechanism based on distributed ledger technologies. The idea is to use a hybrid of IOTA technology and Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-Based Signcryption (CP-ABSC) technology. The permissions to access these data are written in a token, and this token will be sent to the Tangle after being signcrypted with CP-ABSC. Consequently, the data will be safeguarded, their confidentiality and integrity will be maintained, and unauthorized individuals will be unable to access the information. The proposed system was evaluated in terms of performance and the results showed that the system is straightforward, rapid, and convenient to use. Furthermore, a security assessment was conducted by running several scenarios to evaluate its feasibility and protection.

Multi authority Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-Based encryption for security enhancement in cloud storage unit

Multi Authority Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-Based Encryption (MCP-ABE) can be developed aimed at enabling efficient secure operation in this research. The proposed methodology is developed to achieve two main characteristics such as to avoid multiuser illegal share their private key and provide data owner to access the data and flexibility to change their access policy. The proposed methodology is providing high security of multi authority with different traceable and dynamic policy updating procedure. The proposed method is implemented in Java and analyzed with performance metrices such as key size, computation time and functionality. Compared to traditional cryptographic methods, attribute-based encryption has a number of benefits, including its adaptable and fine-grained control of access. Additionally, it is independent of key sharing and management methods that may protect against security attacks, a method of undermining encryption. The proposed methodology is protecting the users with different conditions such as data protection, fraud prevention, message detection and general attack resistance. To validate the performance of the proposed methodology, it can be contrasted with the conventional methods such as Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-Based Signcryption with Outsourced Designcryption (CP-OABSC) and revocable signature (CP-ABSC) with Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-Based Signcryption With Accountable and Verifiable Outsourced Designcryption (CP-ABSc-AVODs) respectively.

A lightweight pairing-free ciphertext-policy attribute-based signcryption for cloud-assisted IoT

A lightweight pairing-free ciphertext-policy attribute-based signcryption for cloud-assisted IoT

Context-aware access control and anonymous authentication in WBAN

The emergence of the Internet of Things (IoT) as the next generation megatrend has paved the way for pervasive, ubiquitous and proficient healthcare monitoring systems. In the diverse kinds of networks, Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) has been perceived as one of the most promising wireless sensor technologies for improving healthcare services thanks to its potential for continuous and real-time monitoring of health conditions. However, the open nature of wireless communication introduces wide security and privacy concerns as personal health information could be exposed to unauthorized parties or even malicious adversaries. Furthermore, in such a dynamic and heterogeneous environment where the context conditions continuously and frequently change, adaptive and context-aware solutions become mandatory to satisfy burgeoning security and privacy requirements. Therefore, it is indispensable to adaptively secure the extra-body communication between the smart portable device held by the WBAN client and the healthcare providers while considering the dynamic context changes. In this paper, we propose a context-aware access control and anonymous authentication approach based on a secure and efficient Hybrid Certificateless Signcryption (H-CLSC) scheme. Particularly, it incorporates the merits of Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-Based Signcryption (CP-ABSC) and Identity-Based Broadcast Signcryption (IBBSC) in order to meet the security requirements and provide adaptive contextual privacy. From a security perspective, the proposed mechanism achieves confidentiality, integrity, anonymity, context-aware privacy, key escrow resistance, public verifiability, and ciphertext authenticity. Performance analysis proves the efficiency and the effectiveness of the H-CLSC scheme compared to benchmark schemes in terms of functional security, storage, communication, and computational cost.

Secure Data Access Control for Fog Computing Based on Multi-Authority Attribute-Based Signcryption with Computation Outsourcing and Attribute Revocation.

Nowadays, fog computing provides computation, storage, and application services to end users in the Internet of Things. One of the major concerns in fog computing systems is how fine-grained access control can be imposed. As a logical combination of attribute-based encryption and attribute-based signature, Attribute-based Signcryption (ABSC) can provide confidentiality and anonymous authentication for sensitive data and is more efficient than traditional “encrypt-then-sign” or “sign-then-encrypt” strategy. Thus, ABSC is suitable for fine-grained access control in a semi-trusted cloud environment and is gaining more and more attention recently. However, in many existing ABSC systems, the computation cost required for the end users in signcryption and designcryption is linear with the complexity of signing and encryption access policy. Moreover, only a single authority that is responsible for attribute management and key generation exists in the previous proposed ABSC schemes, whereas in reality, mostly, different authorities monitor different attributes of the user. In this paper, we propose OMDAC-ABSC, a novel data access control scheme based on Ciphertext-Policy ABSC, to provide data confidentiality, fine-grained control, and anonymous authentication in a multi-authority fog computing system. The signcryption and designcryption overhead for the user is significantly reduced by outsourcing the undesirable computation operations to fog nodes. The proposed scheme is proven to be secure in the standard model and can provide attribute revocation and public verifiability. The security analysis, asymptotic complexity comparison, and implementation results indicate that our construction can balance the security goals with practical efficiency in computation.

Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-Based Signcryption With Verifiable Outsourced Designcryption for Sharing Personal Health Records

Personal health record (PHR) is a patient-centric model of health information exchange, which greatly facilitates the storage, access, and share of personal health information. In order to share the valuable resources and reduce the operational cost, the PHR service providers would like to store the PHR applications and health information data in the cloud. The private health information may be exposed to unauthorized organizations or individuals since the patient lost the physical control of their health information. Ciphertext-policy attribute-based signcryption is a promising solution to design a cloud-assisted PHR secure sharing system. It provides fine-grained access control, confidentiality, authenticity, and sender privacy of PHR data. However, a large number of pairing and modular exponentiation computations bring heavy computational overhead during designcryption process. In order to reconcile the conflict of high computational overhead and low efficiency in the designcryption process, an outsourcing scheme is proposed in this paper. In our scheme, the heavy computations are outsourced to ciphertext transformed server, only leaving a small computational overhead for the PHR user. At the same time, the extra communication overhead in our scheme is actually tolerable. Furthermore, theoretical analysis and the desired securing properties including confidentiality, unforgeability, and verifiability have been proved formally in the random oracle model. Experimental evaluation indicates that the proposed scheme is practical and feasible.

Secure Multi-Authority Data Access Control Scheme in Cloud Storage System Based on Attribute-Based Signcryption

Nowadays, secure data access control has become one of the major concerns in a cloud storage system. As a logical combination of attribute-based encryption and attribute-based signature, attribute-based signcryption (ABSC) can provide confidentiality and an anonymous authentication for sensitive data and is more efficient than traditional “encrypt-then-sign” or “sign-then-encrypt” strategies. Thus, ABSC is suitable for fine-grained access control in a semi-trusted cloud environment and is gaining more and more attention in recent years. However, in many previous ABSC schemes, user’s sensitive attributes can be disclosed to the authority, and only a single authority that is responsible for attribute management and key generation exists in the system. In this paper, we propose PMDAC-ABSC, a novel privacy-preserving data access control scheme based on Ciphertext-Policy ABSC, to provide a fine-grained control measure and attribute privacy protection simultaneously in a multi-authority cloud storage system. The attributes of both the signcryptor and the designcryptor can be protected to be known by the authorities and cloud server. Furthermore, the decryption overhead for user is significantly reduced by outsourcing the undesirable bilinear pairing operations to the cloud server without degrading the attribute privacy. The proposed scheme is proven to be secure in the standard model and has the ability to provide confidentiality, unforgeability, anonymous authentication, and public verifiability. The security analysis, asymptotic complexity comparison, and implementation results indicate that our construction can balance the security goals with practical efficiency in computation.

A secure and efficient Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-Based Signcryption for Personal Health Records sharing in cloud computing

In recent years, Personal Health Record (PHR) system has attracted intensive attention due to its universal accessibility and low cost. The practical deployment of PHR system in cloud computing environments raises privacy and information security issues that should be addressed positively. Recently [Future Generation Computer Systems 52 (2015)], a Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-Based Signcryption (CP-ABSC) scheme (Liu et al. 2015) is proposed with the aim to securing PHR data stored at cloud servers, and it is claimed to provide confidentiality against chosen ciphertext attacks in selective-predicate model. Unfortunately, we show in this paper that the claim is incorrect. Besides, the CP-ABSC scheme Liu et al. (2015) cannot realize the property of public ciphertext verifiability which is an essential requirement of signcryption schemes to reduce unnecessary burden on the decryptor for decrypting invalid ciphertexts. In this paper, we propose a provable secure CP-ABSC scheme for cloud-based PHR sharing system that has ability to provide fine-grained access control, confidentiality, authenticity, signcryptor privacy and public verifiability, simultaneously. Our framework exploits expressive monotone boolean functions as signing and encryption predicates, and realizes security in the standard model. On the positive note, our construction exhibits short ciphertext size and requires less number of pairing computations compared to the existing schemes in the area.

Secure sharing of Personal Health Records in cloud computing: Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-Based Signcryption

The sharing of Personal Health Records (PHR) in cloud computing is a promising platform of health information exchange. However, the storage of personal medical and health information is usually outsourced to some third parties which may result in the exposure of patients’ privacy to unauthorized individuals or organizations. In order to address this security loophole, we suggest a promising solution. We propose a new approach for fine-grained access control and secure sharing of signcrypted (sign-then-encrypt) data. We call our new primitive Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-Based Signcryption (CP-ABSC) which satisfies the requirements of cloud computing scenarios for PHR. CP-ABSC combines the merits of digital signature and encryption to provide confidentiality, authenticity, unforgeability, anonymity and collusion resistance. The correctness, security and efficiency of this scheme are also proven.