AnonyControl: Control Cloud Data Anonymously with Multi-Authority Attribute-Based Encryption

Cloud computing is a revolutionary computing paradigm which enables flexible, on-demand and low-cost usage of computing resources. However, those advantages, ironically, are the causes of security and privacy problems, which emerge because the data owned by different users are stored in some cloud servers instead of under their own control. To deal with security problems, various schemes based on the Attribute- Based Encryption (ABE) have been proposed recently. However, the privacy problem of cloud computing is yet to be solved. This paper presents an anonymous privilege control scheme AnonyControl to address the user and data privacy problem in a cloud. By using multiple authorities in cloud computing system, our proposed scheme achieves anonymous cloud data access, finegrained privilege control, and more importantly, tolerance to up to (N -2) authority compromise. Our security and performance analysis show that AnonyControl is both secure and efficient for cloud computing environment.Comment: 9 pages, 6 figures, 3 tables, conference, IEEE INFOCOM 201

Server-Aided Revocable Predicate Encryption: Formalization and Lattice-Based Instantiation

Efficient user revocation is a necessary but challenging problem in many multi-user cryptosystems. Among known approaches, server-aided revocation yields a promising solution, because it allows to outsource the major workloads of system users to a computationally powerful third party, called the server, whose only requirement is to carry out the computations correctly. Such a revocation mechanism was considered in the settings of identity-based encryption and attribute-based encryption by Qin et al. (ESORICS 2015) and Cui et al. (ESORICS 2016), respectively. In this work, we consider the server-aided revocation mechanism in the more elaborate setting of predicate encryption (PE). The latter, introduced by Katz, Sahai, and Waters (EUROCRYPT 2008), provides fine-grained and role-based access to encrypted data and can be viewed as a generalization of identity-based and attribute-based encryption. Our contribution is two-fold. First, we formalize the model of server-aided revocable predicate encryption (SR-PE), with rigorous definitions and security notions. Our model can be seen as a non-trivial adaptation of Cui et al.'s work into the PE context. Second, we put forward a lattice-based instantiation of SR-PE. The scheme employs the PE scheme of Agrawal, Freeman and Vaikuntanathan (ASIACRYPT 2011) and the complete subtree method of Naor, Naor, and Lotspiech (CRYPTO 2001) as the two main ingredients, which work smoothly together thanks to a few additional techniques. Our scheme is proven secure in the standard model (in a selective manner), based on the hardness of the Learning With Errors (LWE) problem.Comment: 24 page

Still Wrong Use of Pairings in Cryptography

Several pairing-based cryptographic protocols are recently proposed with a wide variety of new novel applications including the ones in emerging technologies like cloud computing, internet of things (IoT), e-health systems and wearable technologies. There have been however a wide range of incorrect use of these primitives. The paper of Galbraith, Paterson, and Smart (2006) pointed out most of the issues related to the incorrect use of pairing-based cryptography. However, we noticed that some recently proposed applications still do not use these primitives correctly. This leads to unrealizable, insecure or too inefficient designs of pairing-based protocols. We observed that one reason is not being aware of the recent advancements on solving the discrete logarithm problems in some groups. The main purpose of this article is to give an understandable, informative, and the most up-to-date criteria for the correct use of pairing-based cryptography. We thereby deliberately avoid most of the technical details and rather give special emphasis on the importance of the correct use of bilinear maps by realizing secure cryptographic protocols. We list a collection of some recent papers having wrong security assumptions or realizability/efficiency issues. Finally, we give a compact and an up-to-date recipe of the correct use of pairings.Comment: 25 page