An Efficient Certificateless Encryption for Secure Data Sharing in Public Clouds

• Published in: IEEE transactions on knowledge and data engineering Vol. 26; no. 9; pp. 2107 - 2119
• Main Authors: Seung-Hyun Seo, Nabeel, Mohamed, Xiaoyu Ding, Bertino, Elisa
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York IEEE 01.09.2014; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Access control; Artificial intelligence; Cloud computing; Cybersecurity; Data encryption; Encryption; Network security; Public key; Public key cryptosystems; Public Key Infrastructure; Cloud computing; certificateless cryptography; access control; confidentiality
• ISSN: 1041-4347; 1558-2191
• DOI: 10.1109/TKDE.2013.138

We propose a mediated certificateless encryption scheme without pairing operations for securely sharing sensitive information in public clouds. Mediated certificateless public key encryption (mCL-PKE) solves the key escrow problem in identity based encryption and certificate revocation problem in public key cryptography. However, existing mCL-PKE schemes are either inefficient because of the use of expensive pairing operations or vulnerable against partial decryption attacks. In order to address the performance and security issues, in this paper, we first propose a mCL-PKE scheme without using pairing operations. We apply our mCL-PKE scheme to construct a practical solution to the problem of sharing sensitive information in public clouds. The cloud is employed as a secure storage as well as a key generation center. In our system, the data owner encrypts the sensitive data using the cloud generated users' public keys based on its access control policies and uploads the encrypted data to the cloud. Upon successful authorization, the cloud partially decrypts the encrypted data for the users. The users subsequently fully decrypt the partially decrypted data using their private keys. The confidentiality of the content and the keys is preserved with respect to the cloud, because the cloud cannot fully decrypt the information. We also propose an extension to the above approach to improve the efficiency of encryption at the data owner. We implement our mCL-PKE scheme and the overall cloud based system, and evaluate its security and performance. Our results show that our schemes are efficient and practical.