Revocable Identity-Based Broadcast Proxy Re-Encryption for Data Sharing in Clouds

Cloud computing has become prevalent due to its nature of massive storage and vast computing capabilities. Ensuring a secure data sharing is critical to cloud applications. Recently, a number of identity-based broadcast proxy re-encryption (IB-BPRE) schemes have been proposed to resolve the problem. However, the IB-BPRE requires a cloud user (Alice) who wants to share data with a bunch of other users (e.g., colleagues) to participate the group shared key renewal process because Alice's private key is a prerequisite for shared key generation. This, however, does not leverage the benefit of cloud computing and causes the inconvenience for cloud users. Therefore, a novel security notion named revocable identity-based broadcast proxy re-encryption (RIB-BPRE) is presented to address the issue of key revocation in this work. In a RIB-BPRE scheme, a proxy can revoke a set of delegates, designated by the delegator, from the re-encryption key. The performance evaluation reveals that the proposed scheme is efficient and practical.