Cryptanalysis and Improvement of an Encoding Method for Private-Key Hidden Vector Encryptions

Abstract

A predicate encryption scheme enables the owner of the master key to enforce fine-grained access control on encrypted cloud data through the delegation of predicate tokens to cloud storages. In particular, Blundo et al. proposed a construction where a predicate token reveals partial information of the involved keywords to enable efficient operations on encrypted keywords. However, we found that a predicate token reveals more information than what was claimed because of the encoding scheme. In this letter, we not only analyze this extra information leakage but also present an improved encoding scheme for the Blundo et al's scheme and the other similar schemes to preserve predicate privacy.