Blockchain-Assisted Comprehensive Key Management in CP-ABE for Cloud-Stored Data

Public clouds have drawn increasing attention from academia and industry due to their high computational and storage performance. Attribute-based encryption (ABE) is the most promising technology to simultaneously achieve confidentiality and fine-grained access control of the cloud-stored data. However, traditional ABE that relies on centralized authority faces several key management issues, such as the key escrow, key distribution, key tracking, key update, and heavy communication and computing overhead for users, which will cause security concerns and impede its widespread application. On the other hand, blockchain technology preserves distributed ledgers to ensure the immutability and transparency of data, which can further solve the security vulnerabilities caused by system centralization. This paper proposes a blockchain-assisted transformation method to solve all the key management problems mentioned above in ciphertext-policy ABE by utilizing technologies such as secret sharing protocols. In addition, our transformation method realizes two additional benefits: outsourced decryption and efficient user revocation, which are extremely valuable for practical implementations. We simulate a demonstration by adopting the most popular permissioned blockchain, Hyperledger Fabric. The security and efficiency analysis reveals that the scheme obtained from our transformation method can achieve replayable chosen-ciphertext security with extremely efficient decryption.