Title: Extensions to ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption to support distributed environments

Authors: Daniel Servos; Sabah Mohammed; Jinan Fiaidhi; Tai hoon Kim

Addresses: Department of Computer Science, Lakehead University, Thunder Bay ON P7B 5E1, Canada ' Department of Computer Science, Lakehead University, Thunder Bay ON P7B 5E1, Canada ' Department of Computer Science, Lakehead University, Thunder Bay ON P7B 5E1, Canada ' Department of Computer Engineering, Glocal Campus, Konkuk University, Korea

Abstract: We present several extensions to the ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption (CP-ABE) scheme, first introduced by Bethencourt et al. in 2007, to support operation in a distributed environment with multiple attribute authorities. Unlike other efforts in creating a multi-authority attribute-based encryption schemes our extensions allow for each authority to be designated a subset of attributes and work independently in creating user keys (i.e. a user need only contact a single authority for their secret key). Additionally, we show that the presented extensions have a minimal impact on performance compared to standard CP-ABE and that both the performance of CP-ABE and our extensions can be improved by computing parts of the user and authority keys in parallel. We also discuss the use of CP-ABE in protecting data confidentiality in public cloud environments.

Keywords: attribute-based encryption; distributed computing; cloud computing; cryptography; access control; ciphertext policy; data confidentiality; public cloud; data security; data protection.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCAT.2013.054354

International Journal of Computer Applications in Technology, 2013 Vol.47 No.2/3, pp.215 - 226

Published online: 05 Jun 2013 *

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