Efficient Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-Based OnlineOffline Encryption with User Revocation

Abstract EN

Attribute-Based Encryption (ABE) must provide an efficient revocation mechanism since a user’s private key can be compromised or expired over time.

The existing revocable ABE schemes have the drawbacks of heavy computational costs on key updates and encryption operations, which make the entities for performing these operations a possible bottleneck in practice applications.

In this paper, we propose an efficient Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-Based Online/Offline Encryption with user Revocation (R-CP-ABOOE).

We integrate the subset difference method with ciphertext-policy ABE to significantly improve key-update efficiency on the side of the trusted party from O(rlog(N/r)) to O(r), where N is the number of users and r is the number of revoked users.

To reduce the encryption burden for mobile devices, we use the online/offline technology to shift the majority of encryption work to the offline phase, and then mobile devices only need to execute a few simple computations to create a ciphertext.

In addition, we exploit a novel trick to prove its selective security under the q-type assumption.

Performance analysis shows that our scheme greatly improves the key-update efficiency for the trusted party and the encryption efficiency for mobile devices.