International Association for Cryptologic Research

International Association
for Cryptologic Research

IACR News item: 05 May 2015

PhD Database PhD Database
Name: Nishant Doshi
Topic: Investigating Approaches for Improving the Ciphertext Policy Attribute Based Encryption
Category: public-key cryptography

Description:

In Ciphertext Policy Attribute Based Encryption (CP-ABE), a secret key of the user as well as the ciphertext (CT) is defined based on the attributes. A user is able to decrypt the ciphertext if and only if the attributes within a policy of ciphertext are satisfied by the attributes of the secret key. If we increase the number of attributes in the policy of ciphertext than the size of final ciphertext will also increase and subsequently leads to communication overhead as well as computational overhead at the receiver side. Hence, it is desirable to ensure constant ciphertext length in CP-ABE. However, the existing schemes in constant CT length proposed so far achieve only a selective security model i.e. the attacker must announce the target access policy before seeing the public parameter. This leads to a weaker security model. Therefore, we propose the fully secure CP-ABE, which requires the attribute set of ciphertext to be a subset of user’s secret key.

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One more limitation of the schemes in constant CT length proposed so far is that they are based on a single authority approach. To deal with a single point of failure in a such a scheme, we propose a multi-authority CP-ABE scheme, with the support for any arbitrary numbers of attribute authorities under a central authority.

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Additionally in the CP-ABE scheme, the receiver’s anonymity is sacrificed as the access structure of the ciphertext reveals the same. The obvious solution to this problem is to hide ciphertext-policy (hidden access structure). However, although this solution uses reasonably computable decryption policies, it generates the ciphertext of a size that is at least, linearly varying with the number of attributes.

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We investigate such issues and propose a novel approach to deal with constant ciphertext length. Thereafter we extend the same approach to provide support for the mult[...]

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