Optimization for Broadcast Encryption in Cloud Using Extended Public Key

Security issues have been a major hurdle for the application of cloud storage. As data encryption is the mainstream method to ensure confidentiality, users always share their data by means of key's management and distribution. However, how to manage massive keys and distribute them securely and efficiently is a challenge in cloud storage. In recent years, broadcast encryption scheme has been paid more attention by researchers to mitigate above problems for cloud data sharing. Since current schemes take insufficient account of changes of users and users's privilege, they do not perform well in cloud. To reduce the overhead of key distribution, an optimization method is proposed for public-key based broadcast encryption in this paper. First, the scope of public keys is expanded to two or more times and the initial related parameters used for generating public keys are kept simultaneously. These parameters can ensure private keys distributed previously still available when they are employed to generate the new public keys for new valid users, thus greatly decreases the cost of redistributing private keys. Second, lazy revocation is adopted to reduce the cost of updating keys. Experimental results show that our optimized method outperforms the existing schemes while adding new users and revoking users' privilege in cloud.