Server-Aided Revocable Attribute-Based Encryption

As a one-to-many public key encryption system, attribute-based encryption (ABE) enables scalable access control over encrypted data in cloud storage services. However, efficient user revocation has been a very challenging problem in ABE. To address this issue, Boldyreva, Goyal and Kumar [5] introduced a revocation method by combining the binary tree data structure with fuzzy identity-based encryption, in which a key generation center (KGC) periodically broadcasts key update information to all data users over a public channel. The Boldyreva-Goyal-Kumar approach reduces the size of key updates from linear to logarithm in the number of users, and it has been widely used in subsequent revocable ABE systems; however, it requires each data user to keep a private key of logarithmic size and all non-revoked data users to periodically update decryption keys for each new time period. To further optimize user revocation in ABE, in this paper, we propose a notion called server-aided revocable ABE (SR-ABE), in which almost all workloads of data users incurred by user revocation are delegated to an untrusted server and each data user only needs to store a key of constant size. We then define a security model for SR-ABE, and present a concrete SR-ABE scheme secure under this model. Interestingly, due to the key embedding gadget employed in the construction of SR-ABE, our SR-ABE scheme does not require any secure channels for key transmission, and also enjoys an additional property in the decryption phase, where a data user only needs to perform one exponentiation computation to decrypt a ciphertext.