A Flexible Secure Key Delegation Mechanism for CP-ABE with Hidden Access Structure

Ciphertext Policy Attribute Based Encryption techniques provide fine grained access control to securely share the data in the organizations where access rights of users vary according to their roles. We have noticed that various key delegation mechanisms are provided for CP-ABE schemes but no key delegation mechanism exists for CP-ABE with hidden access policy. In practical, users’ identity may be revealed from access policy in the organizations and unlimited further delegations may results in unauthorized data access. For maintaining the users’ anonymity, the access structure should be hidden and every user must be restricted for specified further delegations. In this work, we have presented a flexible secure key delegation mechanism for CP-ABE with hidden access structure. The proposed scheme enhances the capability of existing CP-ABE schemes by supporting flexible delegation, attribute revocation and user revocation with negligible enhancement in computational cost.