Efficient Certificate-Based Proxy Re-encryption Scheme for Data Sharing in Public Clouds

Nowadays, public cloud storage is gaining popularity and a growing number of users are beginning to use the public cloud storage for online data storing and sharing. However, how the encrypted data stored in public clouds can be effectively shared becomes a new challenge. Proxy re-encryption is a public-key primitive that can delegate the decryption right from one user to another. In a proxy re-encryption system, a semi-trusted proxy authorized by a data owner is allowed to transform an encrypted data under the data owner's public key into a re-encrypted data under an authorized recipient's public key without seeing the underlying plaintext. Hence, the paradigm of proxy re-encryption provides a promising solution to effectively share encrypted data. In this paper, we propose a new certificate-based proxy re-encryption scheme for encrypted data sharing in public clouds. In the random oracle model, we formally prove that the proposed scheme achieves chosen-ciphertext security. The simulation results show that it is more efficient than the previous certificate-based proxy re-encryption schemes.