Accountable multi-authority ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption without key escrow and key abuse

Abstract

Ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption (CP-ABE) is a promising public key encryption primitive enabling fine-grained access control on shared data in public cloud. However, two quite challenging issues, the prevention of key escrow and key abuse, still exist in CP-ABE system. In this paper, we propose a multi-authority CP-ABE scheme without key escrow and key abuse. To prevent key escrow, multiple authorities are employed to perform the same procedure of key generation for an attribute. Thus, no individual authority or colluded authorities that manage no common attribute can decrypt any ciphertext, and it can also resist collusion attack from curious authority with the help of dishonest users. To prevent key abuse of dishonest users, user’s global identifier along with a signature is embedded into the secret key. Thus, any third party can learn the identity from a shared secret key and publicly verify its validity. An advantage of simultaneously preventing key escrow and key abuse is that the proposed scheme can achieve accountability, i.e. an auditor can publicly audit a user or authorities abuse the secret key. At last, the proposed scheme is fully secure in the random oracle model, and due to a key aggregate algorithm its efficiency is comparable to the decentralizing CP-ABE scheme [18] on which it is based.