As a new kind of patient-centred health-records model, the personal health record (PHR) system can support the patient in sharing his/her health information online. Attribute-Based Encryption (ABE), as a new public key cryptosystem that guarantees fine-grained access control of outsourced encrypted data, has been used to design the PHR system. Considering that privacy preservation and policy updating are the key problems in PHR, a privacy-preserving multiauthority attribute-based encryption scheme with dynamic policy updating in PHR was proposed. In the scheme, each of the patient?s attributes is divided into two parts: attribute name and attribute value. The values of the user?s attributes will be hidden to prevent them from being revealed to any third parties. In addition, the Linear Secret-Sharing Scheme (LSSS) access structure and policy-updating algorithms are designed to support all types of policy updating (based on ?and?, ?or?, and ?not? operations). Finally, the scheme is demonstrated to be secure against chosen-plaintext attack under the standard model. Compared to the existing related schemes, the sizes of the user?s secret key and ciphertext are reduced, and the lower computing cost makes it more effective in the PHR system.

In order to solve the problem that most of the existing blockchain-based searchable encryption schemes only support exact keyword search and mutual distrust between the cloud server and the user, a searchable encryption scheme based on blockchain, that has functions such as file update dynamically, search results verification, fuzzy keyword search, and fair payment, is proposed. We use edit distance to generate the fuzzy keywords set. According to the un-modification characteristic of Ethereum blockchain and the security of the RSA accumulator, our scheme can verify the search results by the smart contract and realize the service-payment fairness between the user and the cloud server. The security analysis shows that the proposed scheme achieves non-adaptive semantic security. Performance analysis and experiment show that our scheme is efficient and meets the demand of search application in the cloud environment.

In a ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption (CP-ABE) system, the decryption keys are only related to attributes shared by multiple users and do not contain any identity information of their original holders. Hence, if a decryption key is leaked, there is no feasible method to trace the suspicious user. The user tracing problem has become an obstacle to the adoption of CP-ABE in practice. In order to address it, some traceable/accountable CP-ABE schemes have been established. However, considering the user tracing problem in multi-domain environment will face new challenges. Multi-domain environments usually have a two-layer structure, domains and intradomain users. When tracing a user, we should first trace the domain where the user is located, and then trace the user in the domain. Unfortunately, the existing traceable CP-ABE schemes only focus on one level of users tracing, and are not suitable for the two-layer structure of multi-domain environments. Therefore, a white-box traceable CP-ABE scheme in multi-domain environment is proposed in this paper. The proposed scheme obtains a so-called two-layer tracing. At the domain level, a short signature technique is used to prevent an attacker from forging the tracing parameter and realize the traceability for domains. Linkable ring signature technology is introduced at the user level to provide a tracing method for users by utilizing the linkability of the signature. The two signature structures are reasonably embedded in a user private key to support two-layer white-box tracing at both domains and intradomain users. The proposed scheme supports any monotone access structures and has full security against chosen plaintext attack in the standard model. Compared with related schemes, the asymptotic communication cost and the asymptotic computation cost of the proposed scheme are relatively low. These advantages make the proposed scheme more practical for solving the user tracing problem in multi-domain environment.

In an intelligent edge network, data owners encrypt data and outsource it to the edge servers to prevent the leakage of data and user information. It is a research issue to achieve efficient search and data update of the ciphertext stored in the edge servers. For the above problems, we construct a fuzzy multi-keyword search scheme based on a two-level tree index, where the first-level tree index stores keyword tags and the second-level stores encrypted file identifiers and counting bloom filters (CBFs). By constructing a two-level tree index, efficient multi-keyword search is realised, and it also has obvious time advantages when performing the single-keyword search. In addition, the proposed scheme supports index updating by introducing the CBF, and it can realise fuzzy search by calculating the inner product between the CBF in index and search trapdoor. At last, the proposed scheme is proved to be semantically secure under the known ciphertext attack model. Theoretical analysis and simulation test indicate that the proposed scheme spends lower computation overhead than other related schemes, especially in the search phase; as the number of matching files or query keywords grows, it costs less time, at around 2–10 ms.