HUAP: Practical Attribute-Based Access Control Supporting Hidden Updatable Access Policies for Resource-Constrained Devices

Attribute-based encryption (ABE) is a promising cryptographic mechanism for providing confidentiality and fine-grained access control in the cloud-based area. However, due to high computational overhead, common ABE schemes are not suitable for resource-constrained devices. Additionally, access policies should be able to be updated efficiently by data owners, and in some circumstances, hidden access policies are necessary to preserve the privacy of clients and data. In this paper, we propose a ciphertext-policy attribute-based access control scheme that, for the first time, simultaneously provides online/offline encryption, hidden access policy, and access policy update. In our scheme, resource-constrained devices are equipped with online/offline encryption reducing the encryption overhead significantly. Furthermore, attributes of access policies are hidden such that the attribute sets satisfying an access policy cannot be guessed by other parties. Moreover, data owners can update their defined access policies while outsourcing a major part of the updating process to the cloud service provider. In particular, we introduce blind access policies that enable the cloud service provider to update the data owners' access policies without receiving a new re-encryption key. Besides, our scheme supports fast decryption such that the decryption algorithm consists of a constant number of bilinear pairing operations. The proposed scheme is proven to be secure in the random oracle model and under the hardness of Decisional Bilinear Diffie-Hellman (DBDH) and Decision Linear (D-Linear) assumptions. Also, performance analysis results demonstrate that the proposed scheme is efficient and practical.(c) 2024 ISC. All rights reserved.