An improved Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-Based Encryption scheme in power cloud access control

Abstract

In power cloud environment, the existing Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-Based Encryption (CP-ABE) access control schemes, do not consider the generation of access structure and the existence of malicious users. To tackle these problems, a power cloud access control (PCAC) scheme is proposed, which improves the traditional CP-ABE access control model. Considering the heavy time consumption of CP-ABE, PCAC encrypts the symmetric key, instead of the raw data. PCAC combines the access tree and linear secret-sharing scheme (LSSS) to achieve the automatic generation and efficient operation of access structure. Additionally, an action audit phase, based on zero-knowledge verification was designed to defend against malicious users. The experiments proved that PCAC meets the requirement of fine-grained access control, in a power cloud. Compared with existing CP-ABE schemes, the PCAC scheme reduced about half of the time consumption, in the action audit phase and costs about one-third the time, in the data obtainment stage.