ABKS has drawn much attention from research and industry in recent years, an ABKS scheme is an encryption scheme that supports keyword search and access control. Attribute-Based Encryption is a public key encryption that enables users to encrypt and decrypt message based on attributes. In a typical implementation, the size of the ciphertext is proportional to the number of attributes associated with it and the decryption time is proportional to the number of attributes used during decryption. Inherit from ABE technology, the computation cost and ciphertext size in most ABKS schemes grow with the complexity of the access policy. On the other hand, we found that the traditional ABKS schemes cannot resist our secret-key-recovery attack. To deal with the above problems, we present new ciphertext policy attribute based encryption with fast keyword search constructions. Our constructions preserve the fine-grained access control inherited from the ABE system while supporting hidden policy and fast keyword search. Our constructions feature multi-value-independent compared with the existing attribute based searchable encryption schemes. The performance analysis demonstrates the efficiency of our constructions. We offer rigorous security proof of our second scheme, which is IND-CKA and IND-CPA secure.

Secure cloud storage, an emerging cloud service, guarantees the confidentiality of outsourced data while providing flexible data access control for cloud users whose data are out of their physical control. Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-Based Encryption (CP-ABE) is one of the promising secure mechanisms to support fine-grained access control on encrypted data in cloud settings. However, due to its inherent "all-or-nothing" decryption control characteristic, there is a risk for the misuse of access credentials. In this paper, we consider the two main types of access credential misuse, namely: semi-trusted authority's illegal access credential (re-)distribution, and cloud user's illegal access credential leakage. To mitigate these two types of access credential misuse, we propose the first accountable authority revokable CP-ABE based cloud storage system with white-box traceability and auditing, referred to as CryptCloud+. We also prove the security of our system and present the experimental results to demonstrate the utility of our system.

It is a challenging issue in smart grid to provide flexible and efficient data aggregation and at the same time maintain data integrity and data privacy. To address this issue, we firstly propose a lightweight t-times homomorphic encryption scheme, which can reduce the computational cost of smart devices further and resist quantum attacks. Based on it, we propose two efficient data aggregation schemes for two application scenarios. The first scheme is suitable for small network, such as home network and small-office network. The second scheme is appropriate for medium-size network, such as a part of smart city. More specifically, we explore how the number of smart devices and the number of home area networks affect the overhead of communication and computation. The experiment results show that the proposed schemes are efficient. Moreover, the proposed schemes not only meet security requirements of integrity, confidentiality, authenticity, resistance to intermediate attack, resistance to replay attack, forward and backward security and resistance to quantum attack, but also reduce the overhead of communication and computation.

Vehicular social networks (VSNs) are likely to play an increasingly important role of the future smart cities, supporting traffic management, real-time warning, and sharing data (e.g., condition, vehicular, and warning). However, there are existing security and privacy issues with vehicular data, which directly lead to the insufficient utilization of vehicular data. In this article, a blockchain-based lightweight searchable data sharing scheme is presented. Specifically, the proposed protocol achieves efficient data matching and data sharing by uniting the feature of public-key encryption with equality test (PKE-ET) and proxy re-encryption (PRE), meanwhile ensuring reliable matching results by invoking smart contacts. Moreover, a reputation-based dynamic PBFT consensus mechanism is provided. By analyzing the reputation and behavior of the consensus nodes, we further reduce the probability of malicious nodes becoming the consensus nodes, thus decreasing the computing overhead and communication costs in the consensus process. Finally, the security of the proposed protocol is demonstrated based on a computation Diffie–Hellman assumption in the Random Oracle model. According to the performance analysis, it was found that compared to the other protocols, the proposed protocol is computationally lightweight.