Improving Security in Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-Based Encryption with Hidden Access Policy and Testing.

Ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption (CP-ABE) is one of the practical technologies to share data over cloud since it can protect data confidentiality and support fine-grained access control on the encrypted data. However, most of the previous schemes only focus on data confidentiality without considering data receiver privacy preserving. Recently, Li et al.(in TIIS, 10(7), 2016.7) proposed a CP-ABE with hidden access policy and testing, where they declare their scheme achieves privacy preserving for the encryptor and decryptor, and also has high decryption efficiency. Unfortunately, in this paper, we show that their scheme fails to achieve hidden access policy at first. It means that any adversary can obtain access policy information by a simple decisional Diffie-Hellman test (DDH-test) attack. Then we give a method to overcome this shortcoming. Security and performance analyses show that the proposed scheme not only achieves the privacy protection for users, but also has higher efficiency than the original one.