CP-ABE for Circuits (and more) in the Symmetric Key Setting

The celebrated work of Gorbunov, Vaikuntanathan and Wee provided the first key policy attribute based encryption scheme (ABE) for circuits from the Learning With Errors (LWE) assumption. However, the arguably more natural ciphertext policy variant has remained elusive, and is a central primitive not yet known from LWE. In this work, we construct the first symmetric key ciphertext policy attribute based encryption scheme (CP-ABE) for all polynomial sized circuits from the learning with errors (LWE) assumption. In more detail, the ciphertext for a message $m$ is labelled with an access control policy $f$, secret keys are labelled with public attributes $x$ from the domain of $f$ and decryption succeeds to yield the hidden message $m$ if and only if $f(x)=1$. The size of our public and secret key do not depend on the size of the circuits supported by the scheme -- this enables our construction to support circuits of unbounded size (but bounded depth). Our construction is secure against collusions of unbounded size. We note that current best CP-ABE schemes [BSW07,Wat11,LOSTW10,OT10,LW12,RW13,Att14,Wee14,AHY15,CGW15,AC17,KW19] rely on pairings and only support circuits in the class NC1 (albeit in the public key setting). We adapt our construction to the public key setting for the case of bounded size circuits. The size of the ciphertext and secret key as well as running time of encryption, key generation and decryption satisfy the efficiency properties desired from CP-ABE, assuming that all algorithms have RAM access to the public key. However, the running time of the setup algorithm and size of the public key depends on the circuit size bound, restricting the construction to support circuits of a-priori bounded size. We remark that the inefficiency of setup is somewhat mitigated by the fact that setup must only be run once. We generalize our construction to consider attribute and function hiding. The compiler of lockable obfuscation upgrades any attribute based encryption scheme to predicate encryption, i.e. with attribute hiding [GKW17,WZ17]. Since lockable obfuscation can be constructed from LWE, we achieve ciphertext policy predicate encryption immediately. For function privacy, we show that the most natural notion of function hiding ABE for circuits, even in the symmetric key setting, is sufficient to imply indistinguishability obfuscation. We define a suitable weakening of function hiding to sidestep the implication and provide a construction to achieve this notion for both the key policy and ciphertext policy case. Previously, the largest function class for which function private predicate encryption (supporting unbounded keys) could be achieved was inner product zero testing, by Shen, Shi and Waters [SSW09]

Lightweight and privacy-aware fine-grained access control for IoT-oriented smart health

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A Ciphertext Policy Attributes-based Encryption Scheme with Policy Revocation

There are a lot of data exchanges among the parties by using cloud computing. So data protection is very important in cloud security environment. Especially, data protection is needed for all organization by security services against unauthorized accesses. There are many security mechanisms for data protection. Attributes-based Encryption (ABE) is a one-to-many encryption to encrypt and decrypt data based on user attributes in which the secret key of a user and the ciphertext are dependent upon attributes. Ciphertext policy attributes-based encryption (CP-ABE), an improvement of ABE schemes performs an access control of security mechanisms for cloud storage. In this paper, sensitive parts of personal health records (PHRs) are encrypted by ABE with the help of CP-ABE. Moreover, an attributes-based policy revocation case is considered as well as user revocation and it needs to generate a new secret key. In proposed policy revocation case, PHRs owner changes attributes policy to update available user lists. A trusted authority (TA) is used to issue secret keys as a third party. This paper emphasizes on key management and it also improves attributes policy management and user revocation. Proposed scheme provides a full control on data owner as much as he changes policy. It supports a flexible policy revocation in CP-ABE and it saves time consuming by comparing with traditional CP-ABE

Data Sharing on Untrusted Storage with Attribute-Based Encryption

Storing data on untrusted storage makes secure data sharing a challenge issue. On one hand, data access policies should be enforced on these storage servers; on the other hand, confidentiality of sensitive data should be well protected against them. Cryptographic methods are usually applied to address this issue -- only encrypted data are stored on storage servers while retaining secret key(s) to the data owner herself; user access is granted by issuing the corresponding data decryption keys. The main challenges for cryptographic methods include simultaneously achieving system scalability and fine-grained data access control, efficient key/user management, user accountability and etc. To address these challenge issues, this dissertation studies and enhances a novel public-key cryptography -- attribute-based encryption (ABE), and applies it for fine-grained data access control on untrusted storage. The first part of this dissertation discusses the necessity of applying ABE to secure data sharing on untrusted storage and addresses several security issues for ABE. More specifically, we propose three enhancement schemes for ABE: In the first enhancement scheme, we focus on how to revoke users in ABE with the help of untrusted servers. In this work, we enable the data owner to delegate most computation-intensive tasks pertained to user revocation to untrusted servers without disclosing data content to them. In the second enhancement scheme, we address key abuse attacks in ABE, in which authorized but malicious users abuse their access privileges by sharing their decryption keys with unauthorized users. Our proposed scheme makes it possible for the data owner to efficiently disclose the original key owner\u27s identity merely by checking the input and output of a suspicious user\u27s decryption device. Our third enhancement schemes study the issue of privacy preservation in ABE. Specifically, our proposed schemes hide the data owner\u27s access policy not only to the untrusted servers but also to all the users. The second part presents our ABE-based secure data sharing solutions for two specific applications -- Cloud Computing and Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). In Cloud Computing cloud servers are usually operated by third-party providers, which are almost certain to be outside the trust domain of cloud users. To secure data storage and sharing for cloud users, our proposed scheme lets the data owner (also a cloud user) generate her own ABE keys for data encryption and take the full control on key distribution/revocation. The main challenge in this work is to make the computation load affordable to the data owner and data consumers (both are cloud users). We address this challenge by uniquely combining various computation delegation techniques with ABE and allow both the data owner and data consumers to securely mitigate most computation-intensive tasks to cloud servers which are envisaged to have unlimited resources. In WSNs, wireless sensor nodes are often unattendedly deployed in the field and vulnerable to strong attacks such as memory breach. For securing storage and sharing of data on distributed storage sensor nodes while retaining data confidentiality, sensor nodes encrypt their collected data using ABE public keys and store encrypted data on storage nodes. Authorized users are given corresponding decryption keys to read data. The main challenge in this case is that sensor nodes are extremely resource-constrained and can just afford limited computation/communication load. Taking this into account we divide the lifetime of sensor nodes into phases and distribute the computation tasks into each phase. We also revised the original ABE scheme to make the overhead pertained to user revocation minimal for sensor nodes. Feasibility of the scheme is demonstrated by experiments on real sensor platforms

Data exploitation and privacy protection in the era of data sharing

As the amount, complexity, and value of data available in both private and public sectors has risen sharply, the competing goals of data privacy and data utility have challenged both organizations and individuals. This dissertation addresses both goals. First, we consider the task of {\it interorganizational data sharing}, in which data owners, data clients, and data subjects have different and sometimes competing privacy concerns. A key challenge in this type of scenario is that each organization uses its own set of proprietary, intraorganizational attributes to describe the shared data; such attributes cannot be shared with other organizations. Moreover, data-access policies are determined by multiple parties and may be specified using attributes that are not directly comparable with the ones used by the owner to specify the data. We propose a system architecture and a suite of protocols that facilitate dynamic and efficient interorganizational data sharing, while allowing each party to use its own set of proprietary attributes to describe the shared data and preserving confidentiality of both data records and attributes. We introduce the novel technique of \textit{attribute-based encryption with oblivious attribute translation (OTABE)}, which plays a crucial role in our solution and may prove useful in other applications. This extension of attribute-based encryption uses semi-trusted proxies to enable dynamic and oblivious translation between proprietary attributes that belong to different organizations. We prove that our OTABE-based framework is secure in the standard model and provide two real-world use cases. Next, we turn our attention to utility that can be derived from the vast and growing amount of data about individuals that is available on social media. As social networks (SNs) continue to grow in popularity, it is essential to understand what can be learned about personal attributes of SN users by mining SN data. The first SN-mining problem we consider is how best to predict the voting behavior of SN users. Prior work only considered users who generate politically oriented content or voluntarily disclose their political preferences online. We avoid this bias by using a novel type of Bayesian-network (BN) model that combines demographic, behavioral, and social features. We test our method in a predictive analysis of the 2016 U.S. Presidential election. Our work is the first to take a semi-supervised approach in this setting. Using the Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm, we combine labeled survey data with unlabeled Facebook data, thus obtaining larger datasets and addressing self-selection bias. The second SN-mining challenge we address is the extent to which Dynamic Bayesian Networks (DBNs) can infer dynamic behavioral intentions such as the intention to get a vaccine or to apply for a loan. Knowledge of such intentions has great potential to improve the design of recommendation systems, ad-targeting mechanisms, public-health campaigns, and other social and commercial endeavors. We focus on the question of how to infer an SN user\u27s \textit{offline} decisions and intentions using only the {\it public} portions of her \textit{online} SN accounts. Our contribution is twofold. First, we use BNs and several behavioral-psychology techniques to model decision making as a complex process that both influences and is influenced by static factors (such as personality traits and demographic categories) and dynamic factors (such as triggering events, interests, and emotions). Second, we explore the extent to which temporal models may assist in the inference task by representing SN users as sets of DBNs that are built using our modeling techniques. The use of DBNs, together with data gathered in multiple waves, has the potential to improve both inference accuracy and prediction accuracy in future time slots. It may also shed light on the extent to which different factors influence the decision-making process

STAIBT: Blockchain and CP-ABE Empowered Secure and Trusted Agricultural IoT Blockchain Terminal

The integration of agricultural Internet of Things (IoT) and blockchain has become the key technology of precision agriculture. How to protect data privacy and security from data source is one of the difficult issues in agricultural IoT research. This work integrates cryptography, blockchain and Interplanetary File System (IPFS) technologies, and proposes a general IoT blockchain terminal system architecture, which strongly supports the integration of the IoT and blockchain technology. This research innovatively designed a fine-grained and flexible terminal data access control scheme based on the ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption (CP-ABE) algorithm. Based on CP-ABE and DES algorithms, a hybrid data encryption scheme is designed to realize 1-to-N encrypted data sharing. A "horizontal + vertical" IoT data segmentation scheme under blockchain technology is proposed to realize the classified release of different types of data on the blockchain. The experimental results show that the design scheme can ensure data access control security, privacy data confidentiality, and data high-availability security. This solution significantly reduces the complexity of key management, can realize efficient sharing of encrypted data, flexibly set access control strategies, and has the ability to store large data files in the agricultural IoT

Shared and Searchable Encrypted Data for Untrusted Servers

Current security mechanisms pose a risk for organisations that outsource their data management to untrusted servers. Encrypting and decrypting sensitive data at the client side is the normal approach in this situation but has high communication and computation overheads if only a subset of the data is required, for example, selecting records in a database table based on a keyword search. New cryptographic schemes have been proposed that support encrypted queries over encrypted data but all depend on a single set of secret keys, which implies single user access or sharing keys among multiple users, with key revocation requiring costly data re-encryption. In this paper, we propose an encryption scheme where each authorised user in the system has his own keys to encrypt and decrypt data. The scheme supports keyword search which enables the server to return only the encrypted data that satisfies an encrypted query without decrypting it. We provide two constructions of the scheme giving formal proofs of their security. We also report on the results of a prototype implementation. This research was supported by the UK’s EPSRC research grant EP/C537181/1. The authors would like to thank the members of the Policy Research Group at Imperial College for their support