Securely Outsourcing Attribute-Based Encryption with Checkability

• Published in: IEEE transactions on parallel and distributed systems Vol. 25; no. 8; pp. 2201 - 2210
• Main Authors: Li, Jin, Huang, Xinyi, Li, Jingwei, Chen, Xiaofeng, Xiang, Yang
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York IEEE 01.08.2014; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Access control; Attribute-based encryption; checkability; Cloud computing; Computation; Constants; Cryptography; Digital signal processing; Educational institutions; Encryption; key issuing; Outsourcing; outsourcing computation; Policies; Tasks; Third party
• ISSN: 1045-9219; 1558-2183
• DOI: 10.1109/TPDS.2013.271

Attribute-Based Encryption (ABE) is a promising cryptographic primitive which significantly enhances the versatility of access control mechanisms. Due to the high expressiveness of ABE policies, the computational complexities of ABE key-issuing and decryption are getting prohibitively high. Despite that the existing Outsourced ABE solutions are able to offload some intensive computing tasks to a third party, the verifiability of results returned from the third party has yet to be addressed. Aiming at tackling the challenge above, we propose a new Secure Outsourced ABE system, which supports both secure outsourced key-issuing and decryption. Our new method offloads all access policy and attribute related operations in the key-issuing process or decryption to a Key Generation Service Provider (KGSP) and a Decryption Service Provider (DSP), respectively, leaving only a constant number of simple operations for the attribute authority and eligible users to perform locally. In addition, for the first time, we propose an outsourced ABE construction which provides checkability of the outsourced computation results in an efficient way. Extensive security and performance analysis show that the proposed schemes are proven secure and practical.