Practical attribute-based encryption: Outsourcing decryption, attribute revocation and policy updating

Abstract

Attribute-Based Encryption (ABE) offers fine-grained access control policy over encrypted data, and thus applicable in cloud storage to provide authorized data privacy. However, there are some issues that should be solved before deploying ABE in practice. Firstly, as the heavy decryption cost grows with the complexity of access policy, an ABE with outsourcing decryption is preferred to relieve user's computation cost. Secondly, when user's attributes are altered, it is required for ABE supporting attribute revocation to change user's access privilege timely and effectively. Thirdly, in the case of access control policy changed by data owner, policy updating requirement must be met in designing ABE. Therefore, a practical ABE scheme is proposed which can solve aforementioned issues simultaneously. In order to support flexible number of attributes, our scheme also achieves large universe and multiple attribute authorities. The security and performance of the proposed scheme are discussed, followed by extensive experiments to demonstrate its effectiveness and practicability.