Title: Gradual identity exposure using attribute-based encryption
Authors: Zhibin Zhou; Dijiang Huang
Addresses: Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona, 85281, USA. ' Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona, 85281, USA
Abstract: Many ciphertext policy attribute-based encryption (CP-ABE) schemes do not protect receivers' privacy, since all the attributes to describe the eligible receivers are transmitted in plain texts. Hidden policy-based ABE schemes have been proposed to protect receivers' privacy. However, hidden policy-based constructions require every user to 'try' decrypting all received cipher messages, which incurs great computation and communication overhead. To address this issue, in this paper, we propose a new concept gradual identity exposure (GIE) to protect data receivers' identity. Our main idea is to reveal the receivers' identities (i.e., the access policy) gradually in the process of decryption, where the required attributes are exposed one-by-one. If the receiver does not possess one attribute in the decryption procedure, the rest of attributes remain hidden. Compared to hidden-policy-based solutions, GIE supports more flexible access policy and, more importantly, provides significant performance improvement in terms of both computation and communication performances. We also present a theoretical framework to model the GIE with several new proposed concepts.
Keywords: identity protection; attributes; attribute-based encryption; privacy protection; cryptography; security; access policy; decryption.
DOI: 10.1504/IJIPSI.2012.046136
International Journal of Information Privacy, Security and Integrity, 2012 Vol.1 No.2/3, pp.278 - 297
Published online: 23 Aug 2014 *
Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article