Attribute-based encryption is a fine-grained access control mechanism designed for one-to-many scenarios, making it particularly well-suited for contemporary data sharing within cloud environments. To mitigate computational overhead, numerous attribute-based encryption schemes founded on elliptic curve cryptography have surfaced in academic literature. Unfortunately, these schemes are either insecure or without security proof. In this manuscript, we first review on the pairing-free ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption schemes introduced by Liu et al. (Entropy 25(7), 2023) and Amirthavalli et al. (Comput Syst Scid Eng 45(3):3079–3095, 2023), and then give a cryptanalysis on their schemes. More precisely, we demonstrate an attack method to their schemes, which allows an adversary to recover the master secret key given a set of private keys sharing at least a same attribute.