An efficient hierarchical multi-authority attribute based encryption scheme for profile matching using a fast ate pairing in cloud environment

—In cloud environment, profile matching is a key technique in applications such as health care and social networks. Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-Based Encryption (CP-ABE) is a suitable technique for data sharing in such environments. In this paper, we propose an asymmetric pairing based Hierarchical Multi-Authority CP-ABE (HM-CP-ABE) construction for profile matching. We utilize the fast Ate pairing to make the proposed HM-CP-ABE scheme efficient. The performance analysis of the proposed scheme shows improved efficiency in terms of computational costs for initialization, key generation and encryption using ELiPS library when compared with existing works.