On the Security of Secure Keyword Search and Data Sharing Mechanism for Cloud Computing

Nearly all of the previous attribute-based proxy re-encryption (ABPRE) schemes cannot support keyword search and keyword updating without the aid of private key generator (PKG) simultaneously. To resolve this problem, recently in IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing (doi: 10.1109/TDSC.2020.2963978), Ge et al. proposed a ciphertext-policy ABPRE scheme with keyword search, dubbed CPAB-KSDS, which supports keyword updating without communicating with PKG. It also achieves indistinguishability against chosen-ciphertext attack (IND-CCA) security and indistinguishability against chosen-keyword attack (IND-CKA) security in the random oracle model. In this paper, we carefully analyze the security of Ge et al.’s CPAB-KSDS scheme and find that they did not give a correct reduction from IND-CKA security of theirs to the underlying cryptographic assumption. Furthermore, we also give a concrete attack on IND-CKA security of the CPAB-KSDS scheme. Therefore, it fails to achieve IND-CKA security they claimed, which is an essential security requirement for the encryption scheme with keyword search.