AN ATTRIBUTE BASED APPROACH TO IMPROVE PRIVACY AND SECURITY IN DECENTRALIED CIPHERTEXT – POLICY

Abstract

We present an efficient cryptographic solution to implement fine-grained access control on encrypted data in scattered environments using Attribute Based Encryption (ABE). In contrast, the existing privacy preserving multiauthority attribute based encryption (PPMA-ABE) schemes are centralized and have been designed primarily to protect only the GID, thus exposing valuable attributes of the user and allowing for identity inference attacks. To overcome these drawbacks, we propose a privacy-preserving decentralized Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-Based Encryption (PPDCP-ABE) scheme in this study to improve the security and privacy in decentralized access control systems. In the proposed structure, there are multiple authorities that operate without having to rely on an authority to start up the system or generate the secret key. This will help the users to retrieve the secret key corresponding to the attributes without revealing the identity and attribute information of the user. The proposed approach reduces the risk of collusion and dependency on trust between authorities by combining anonymous credential concepts with the use of decentralized key management. Furthermore, it provides the flexibility to have varying access modalities and authorities engagement dynamics without changing the system itself. The proposed solution offers a secure and privacy-preserving decentralised system for sharing and controlled access to encrypted data.