English

On the security of the hierarchical attribute based encryption scheme proposed by Wang et al

Cryptography and Security 2018-10-16 v1

Abstract

Ciphertext-policy hierarchical attribute-based encryption (CP-HABE) is a promising cryptographic primitive for enforcing the fine-grained access control with scalable key delegation and user revocation mechanisms on the outsourced encrypted data in a cloud. Wang et al. (2011) proposed the first CP-HABE scheme and showed that the scheme is semantically secure in the random oracle model [4, 5]. Due to some weakness in its key delegation mechanism, by presenting two attacks, we demonstrate the scheme does not offer any confidentiality and fine-grained access control. In this way, anyone who has just one attribute can recover any outsourced encrypted data in the cloud.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1810.05864,
  title  = {On the security of the hierarchical attribute based encryption scheme proposed by Wang et al},
  author = {Mohammad Ali and Javad Mohajeri and Mohammad-Reza Sadeghi},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1810.05864},
  year   = {2018}
}