A new encrypted data switching Protocol: Bridging IBE and ABE without loss of data confidentiality

Abstract

Encryption technologies have become one of the most prevalent solutions to safeguard data confidentiality in may real-world applications, e.g., cloud-based data storage systems. Encryption outputting a relatively “static” format of encrypted data, however, may hinder further data operations, for example, encrypted data may need to be “transformed” into other formats for either computation or other purposes. In order to enable an encryption to be used in another device equipped with a different encryption mechanism, the concept of encryption switching is first proposed in CRYPTO 2016 for conversion particularly between Paillier and ElGamal encryptions. This paper considers the conversion between conventional identity-based and attribute-based encryptions and further proposes a concrete construction via the technique of proxy reencryption. The construction is proved to be CPA secure in the standard model under q-decisional parallel bilinear Diffie-Hellman exponent assumption. The performance comparisons highlight that our bridging mechanism reduces computation and communication cost on client side, especially when the data of client is encrypted and outsourced to remote cloud. The computational costs w.r.t. re-encryption (on server side) and decryption (on client side) are acceptable in practice