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A Lightweight Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-Based Encryption for Fine-Grained Access Control

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Part of the book series: Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing ((AISC,volume 915))

Abstract

With the expansion of data, companies start to look for new efficient and cheap alternatives to store, share and manage their data. In this regard, cloud storage services appeared to fill this gap by providing a huge amount of computing resources ensuring data availability and efficient data management with low cost due to the pay-as-you-go payment-model adopted by cloud providers. However, by outsourcing their sensitive data (financial data, health records …), companies will no longer be in control of them, so this arises big challenges related to the confidentiality and data security against attackers (in case of compromised cloud servers) and even against curious cloud providers. Therefore, encrypting data before outsourcing them is the only way that gives to the data owners the control over their data. However, using traditional public key cryptography in a data-sharing context produces an unnecessary communication and computation overhead since for each targeted user, the data owner needs to encrypt a copy of data with the corresponding user’s public key. To fix this problem, many attribute-based encryption (ABE) schemes were proposed. In the ABE model, the encryption process is done based on the attributes instead of a unique public key, and users with matching attributes can decrypt the ciphertext, so data owners in this model don’t need to generate many copies of the same data as in the traditional cryptosystems. However, these schemes still require a huge computational power and communication cost since they are based on expensive bilinear pairing and modular exponentiation operations. We propose a lightweight version of the Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-Based Encryption (CP-ABE) using elliptic curve cryptography and scalar point multiplications, instead of bilinear pairings and modular exponentiations, to ensure a fine-grained access control with less computation cost and shorter keys and ciphertexts. The results show that our scheme improves the execution efficiency and requires a low-cost communication and storage.

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Acknowledgements

This work is supported by the National Center for Scientific and Technical Research’s (CNRST) scholarship M.06/4.

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Correspondence to Hassan El Gafif .

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El Gafif, H., Meddah, N., Toumanari, A. (2019). A Lightweight Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-Based Encryption for Fine-Grained Access Control. In: Ezziyyani, M. (eds) Advanced Intelligent Systems for Sustainable Development (AI2SD’2018). AI2SD 2018. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 915. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11928-7_2

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