Cryptanalysis of Two Outsourced Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-Based Encryption Schemes
摘要
Outsourced Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-Based Encryption (CP-ABE) has emerged as a promising solution that enables fine-grained access control over encrypted data, making it well-suited for cloud-based data storage and sharing systems, especially when resource-constrained devices delegate computationally intensive tasks to cloud servers. To address the computational overhead of encryption, several outsourced CP-ABE schemes have been proposed, allowing heavy encryption computations to be offloaded to cloud servers. However, outsourcing encryption to potentially untrusted cloud servers introduces new security challenges, particularly regarding data confidentiality. Recently, Zhang et al. and Miao et al. independently proposed two outsourced CP-ABE schemes. The Zhang et al. scheme is a proxy re-encryption scheme, where the cloud server converts an identity-based encryption ciphertext into a CP-ABE ciphertext to establish a fine-grained data sharing mechanism in the Industrial Internet of Things environments. The scheme proposed by Miao et al. is an outsourced CP-ABE with verifiable encryption that establishes a fine-grained data sharing mechanism in the cloud-assisted mobile electronic health system, and later they extend it for verifiable decryption. The authors in both the schemes claimed that their proposed schemes preserve data confidentiality against the semi-trusted cloud server and unauthorized users. However, after a comprehensive security analysis of these two prominent outsourced CP-ABE schemes, we identify that the two schemes fail to provide data confidentiality. After carefully revisiting Zhang et al. and Miao et al. schemes, in this paper, we demonstrate that their schemes fail to provide data confidentiality by proposing message recovery attacks. Our attacks show that the semi-trusted cloud server can successfully extract the plaintext encoded in a ciphertext.