Attribute-Based Access Control with Efficient Revocation in Data Outsourcing Systems

TLDR

Data outsourcing faces key challenges in enforcing authorization policies and supporting policy updates, and while ciphertext‑policy attribute‑based encryption offers a promising solution, its application in outsourced architectures introduces significant attribute and user revocation challenges. The paper proposes an access control mechanism that uses ciphertext‑policy attribute‑based encryption to enforce policies with efficient attribute and user revocation. The mechanism employs a dual encryption scheme that combines ciphertext‑policy attribute‑based encryption with selective group key distribution per attribute group to enable fine‑grained access control and secure management of outsourced data. Analysis shows that the proposed scheme is both efficient and secure for data outsourcing systems.

Abstract

Some of the most challenging issues in data outsourcing scenario are the enforcement of authorization policies and the support of policy updates. Ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption is a promising cryptographic solution to these issues for enforcing access control policies defined by a data owner on outsourced data. However, the problem of applying the attribute-based encryption in an outsourced architecture introduces several challenges with regard to the attribute and user revocation. In this paper, we propose an access control mechanism using ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption to enforce access control policies with efficient attribute and user revocation capability. The fine-grained access control can be achieved by dual encryption mechanism which takes advantage of the attribute-based encryption and selective group key distribution in each attribute group. We demonstrate how to apply the proposed mechanism to securely manage the outsourced data. The analysis results indicate that the proposed scheme is efficient and secure in the data outsourcing systems.