In e-healthcare record systems (EHRS), attribute-based encryption (ABE) appears as a natural way to achieve fine-grained access control on health records. Some proposals exploit key-policy ABE (KP-ABE) to protect privacy in such a way that all users are associated with specific access policies and only the ciphertexts matching the users' access policies can be decrypted. An issue with KP-ABE is that it requires an a priori formulation of access policies during key generation, which is not always practicable in EHRS because the policies to access health records are sometimes determined after key generation. In this paper, we revisit KP-ABE and propose a dynamic ABE paradigm, referred to as access policy redefinable ABE (APR-ABE). To address the above issue, APR-ABE allows users to redefine their access policies and delegate keys for the redefined ones; hence, a priori precise policies are no longer mandatory. We construct an APR-ABE scheme with short ciphertexts and prove its full security in the standard model under several static assumptions.
The flexible encryption property of ABE made it widely adopted in e-healthcare record systems. Li @cite_10 leveraged ABE to encrypt personal health records in cloud computing and exploited multi-authority ABE to achieve a high degree of privacy of records. Yu @cite_22 adopted and tailored ABE for wireless sensors of e-healthcare systems. Liang @cite_2 also applied ABE to secure private health records in health social networks. In their solution, users can verify each other's identifiers without seeing sensitive attributes, which yields a high level of privacy. Noting that the application of KP-ABE to distributed sensors in e-healthcare systems introduces several challenges regarding attribute and user revocation, Hur @cite_23 proposed an access control scheme using KP-ABE that has efficient attribute and user revocation capabilities.
@cite_10 @cite_22 @cite_23 @cite_2
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Attribute-based encryption (ABE), as introduced by Sahai and Waters, allows for fine-grained access control on encrypted data. In its key-policy flavor, the primitive enables senders to encrypt messages under a set of attributes and private keys are associated with access structures that specify which ciphertexts the key holder will be allowed to decrypt. In most ABE systems, the ciphertext size grows linearly with the number of ciphertext attributes and the only known exceptions only support restricted forms of threshold access policies. This paper proposes the first key-policy attribute-based encryption (KP-ABE) schemes allowing for non-monotonic access structures (i.e., that may contain negated attributes) and with constant ciphertext size. Towards achieving this goal, we first show that a certain class of identity-based broadcast encryption schemes generically yields monotonic KPABE systems in the selective set model. We then describe a new efficient identity-based revocation mechanism that, when combined with a particular instantiation of our general monotonic construction, gives rise to the first truly expressive KP-ABE realization with constant-size ciphertexts. The downside of these new constructions is that private keys have quadratic size in the number of attributes. On the other hand, they reduce the number of pairing evaluations to a constant, which appears to be a unique feature among expressive KP-ABE schemes. Distributed sensor networks are becoming a robust solution that allows users to directly access data generated by individual sensors. In many practical scenarios, fine-grained access control is a pivotal security requirement to enhance usability and protect sensitive sensor information from unauthorized access. Recently, there have been proposed many schemes to adapt public key cryptosystems into sensor systems consisting of high-end sensor nodes in order to enforce security policy efficiently. However, the drawback of these approaches is that the complexity of computation increases linear to the expressiveness of the access policy. Key-policy attribute-based encryption is a promising cryptographic solution to enforce fine-grained access policies on the sensor data. However, the problem of applying it to distributed sensor networks introduces several challenges with regard to the attribute and user revocation. In this paper, we propose an access control scheme using KP-ABE with efficient attribute and user revocation capability for distributed sensor networks that are composed of high-end sensor devices. They can be achieved by the proxy encryption mechanism which takes advantage of attribute-based encryption and selective group key distribution. The analysis results indicate that the proposed scheme achieves efficient user access control while requiring the same computation overhead at each sensor as the previous schemes. With the ever increasing number of connected devices and the over abundance of data generated by these devices, data privacy has become a critical concern in the Internet of Things (IoT). One promising privacy-preservation approach is Attribute-Based Encryption (ABE), a public key encryption scheme that enables fine-grained access control, scalable key management and flexible data distribution. This paper presents an in-depth performance evaluation of ABE that focuses on execution time, data and network overhead, energy consumption, and CPU and memory usage. We evaluate two major types of ABE, Key-Policy Attribute-Based Encryption (KP-ABE) and Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-Based Encryption (CP-ABE), on different classes of mobile devices including a laptop and a smartphone. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first comprehensive study of ABE dedicated solely to its performance. Our results provide insights into important practical issues of ABE, including what computing resources ABE requires in heterogeneous environments, at what cost ABE offers benefits, and under what situations ABE is best suited for use in the IoT. In distributed systems users need to share sensitive objects with others based on the recipients' ability to satisfy a policy. Attribute-Based Encryption (ABE) is a new paradigm where such policies are specified and cryptographically enforced in the encryption algorithm itself. Ciphertext-Policy ABE (CP-ABE) is a form of ABE where policies are associated with encrypted data and attributes are associated with keys. In this work we focus on improving the flexibility of representing user attributes in keys. Specifically, we propose Ciphertext Policy Attribute Set Based Encryption (CP-ASBE) - a new form of CP-ABE - which, unlike existing CP-ABE schemes that represent user attributes as a monolithic set in keys, organizes user attributes into a recursive set based structure and allows users to impose dynamic constraints on how those attributes may be combined to satisfy a policy. We show that the proposed scheme is more versatile and supports many practical scenarios more naturally and efficiently. We provide a prototype implementation of our scheme and evaluate its performance overhead.