Verifiable outsourced ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption for mobile cloud computing

Abstract

With the development of wireless access technologies and the popularity of mobile intelligent terminals, cloud computing is expected to expand to mobile environments. Attribute-based encryption, widely applied in cloud computing, incurs massive computational cost during the encryption and decryption phases. The computational cost grows with the complexity of the access policy. This disadvantage becomes more serious for mobile devices because they have limited resources. To address this problem, we present an efficient verifiable outsourced scheme based on the bilinear group of prime order. The scheme is called the verifiable outsourced computation ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption scheme (VOC-CP-ABE), and it provides a way to outsource intensive computing tasks during encryption and decryption phases to CSP without revealing the private information and leaves only marginal computation to the user. At the same time, the outsourced computation can be verified by two hash functions. Then, the formal security proofs of its (selective) CPA security and verifiability are provided. Finally, we discuss the performance of the proposed scheme with comparisons to several related works.