Towards efficient sharing of encrypted data in cloud-based mobile social network

Abstract

Mobile social network is becoming more and more popular with respect to the development and popularity of mobile devices and interpersonal sociality. As the amount of social data increases in a great deal and cloud computing techniques become developed, the architecture of mobile social network is evolved into cloud-based that mobile clients send data to the cloud and make data accessible from clients. The data in the cloud should be stored in a secure fashion to protect user privacy and restrict data sharing defined by users. Ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption (CP-ABE) is currently considered to be a promising security solution for cloud-based mobile social network to encrypt the sensitive data. However, its ciphertext size and decryption time grow linearly with the attribute numbers in the access structure. In order to reduce the computing overhead held by the mobile devices, in this paper we propose a new Outsourcing decryption and Match-then-decrypt CP-ABE algorithm (OM-CP-ABE) which firstly outsources the computation-intensive bilinear pairing operations to a proxy, and secondly performs the decryption test on the attributes set matching access policy in ciphertexts. The experimental performance assessments show the security strength and efficiency of the proposed solution in terms of computation, communication, and storage. Also, our construction is proven to be replayable choosen-ciphertext attacks (RCCA) secure based on the decisional bilinear Diffie-Hellman (DBDH) assumption in the standard model.