Attribute-Based Encryption Scheme for Secure Multi-Group Data Sharing in Cloud

Most of the organizations using the cloud-based data sharing platforms are multi-group in nature. The existing directly revocable attribute-based encryption (ABE) schemes though seem to be a good fit, but they fail to provide any effective solution for secure multi-group data sharing scenarios. To bridge this gap, we first propose Revocable ABE with Verifiable Outsourced decryption (ReVO-ABE)- a directly revocable collusion-resistant ABE scheme that allows any number of user revocation and joining without affecting the secret membership keys of the nonrevoked users. Based on ReVO-ABE, we build a Dynamic Multi-Group Secure Data Sharing scheme called DMG-SDS. For operations that are exclusive to multi-groups like group merge and split can be performed without affecting the attribute secret keys or membership keys of the nonrevoked users, which is not possible with any of the existing schemes. Our proposed scheme meets the necessary security requirements, and the performance assessment shows that it has much better performance benefits when compared with most the recent competitive schemes.

Automated summary

This article introduces a new secure multi-group data sharing scheme, ReVO-ABE, based on revocable attribute-based encryption, and a dynamic multi-group secure data sharing scheme, DMG-SDS, built on top of ReVO-ABE. The proposed scheme allows multi-group operations without affecting the keys of nonrevoked users and exhibits better performance compared to recent competitive schemes.