Improving security and efciency for encrypted data sharing in online social networks

Despite that existing data sharing systems in online social networks (OSNs) propose to encrypt data before sharing, the multiparty access control of encrypted data has become a challenging issue. In this paper, we propose a secure data sharing scheme in OSNs based on ciphertext-policy attribute-based proxy re-encryption and secret sharing. In order to protect users' sensitive data, our scheme allows users to customize access policies of their data and then outsource encrypted data to the OSNs service provider. Our scheme presents a multiparty access control model, which enables the disseminator to update the access policy of ciphertext if their attributes satisfy the existing access policy. Further, we present a partial decryption construction in which the computation overhead of user is largely reduced by delegating most of the decryption operations to the OSNs service provider. We also provide checkability on the results returned from the OSNs service provider to guarantee the correctness of partial decrypted ciphertext. Moreover, our scheme presents an efficient attribute revocation method that achieves both forward and backward secrecy. The security and performance analysis results indicate that the proposed scheme is secure and effcient in OSNs.