P-CP-ABE: Parallelizing Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-Based Encryption for Clouds

Recently, cloud storage has become quite attractive due to its elasticity, availability and scalability. However, the security issue has started to prevent public clouds from getting even more popular. Traditional encryption algorithms (both symmetric and asymmetric ones) fail to help achieve effective secure cloud storage due to their severe issues such as complex key management and heavy redundancy. Ciphertext-Policy Attribute Based Encryption (CP-ABE) scheme overcomes the aforementioned issues and provides fine-grained access control as well as deduplication features. CP-ABE has becomes a possible solution to cloud storage. However, its high complexity has prevented it from being widely adopted. This paper proposes a P-CP-ABE scheme to parallelize CP-ABE and port it to multi-core architecture machines. Major performance bottlenecks such as key management and encryption/decryption process are identified and accelerated. New AES encryption operation mode is adopted for further performance gains. Experimental results have demonstrated its effectiveness.