Highly Efficient and Revocable CP-ABE with Outsourcing Decryption for IoT

Ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption(CP-ABE) is considered a promising solution for secure data sharing in the cloud environment. Although very well expressiveness in ABE constructions can be achieved using a linear secret sharing scheme(LSSS), there is a significant drawback in such constructions. In the LSSS-based ABE constructions, the number of heavy pairing operations increases with an increase in the number of required attributes in the decryption. In this paper, we propose an LSSS-based CP-ABE scheme with a fixed number of pairings(four pairings) during the decryption process. In our scheme increasing the number of required attributes in the decryption does not affect the number of pairings. The simulation shows that our scheme has significant advantages in the encryption and the decryption processes compared to previous schemes. In addition, we use the outsourcing method in the decryption to get better performance on the user side. The main burden of decryption computations is done by the cloud without revealing any information about the plaintext. Furthermore, in our revocation method, the users’ communication channels are not used during the revocation process. All of these features make our scheme suitable for applications such as IoT. The proposed scheme is selectively CPA-secure in the standard model.