Cloud computing has become prevalent due to its extensive storage resources and robust computational capacities. To protect data security and privacy, data owners opt for uploading encrypted data to the cloud. Flexible sharing of these encrypted data in a group of users is a critical functionality in cloud storage. In addition, given that users may exit the group, revocation becomes a crucial requirement in group data-sharing systems. The Key-Aggregate Cryptosystem (KAC) has become a promising mechanism for group data sharing. The decryption rights for any set of ciphertexts can be efficiently delegated by distributing a constant-size aggregate key, while the confidentiality of other ciphertexts outside the set is maintained. However, in previous KAC schemes, revocation remains a challenging task regarding key update, ciphertext re-encryption, and collision resistance. In this paper, we propose a Key-Aggregate Cryptosystem with User Revocation (KAC-UR) scheme to overcome this challenge. The KAC-UR scheme not only achieves flexible data sharing, but also can perform secure and efficient user revocation with properties including collision resistance, revocation without data owner-user communication, and constant ciphertext size. The KAC-UR scheme also enables the cloud server to perform partial decryption, thereby significantly alleviating the computational burden for users. The KAC-UR scheme is chosen plaintext attack secure under the decisional Bilinear Diffie-Hellman Exponent assumption.

Zero-shot learning (ZSL) which aims to recognize unseen classes with no labeled training sample, efficiently tackles the problem of missing labeled data in image retrieval. Nowadays there are mainly two types of popular methods for ZSL to recognize images of unseen classes: probabilistic reasoning and feature projection. Different from these existing types of methods, we propose a new method: sample construction to deal with the problem of ZSL. Our proposed method, called Imagination Based Sample Construction (IBSC), innovatively constructs image samples of target classes in feature space by mimicking human associative cognition process. Based on an association between attribute and feature, target samples are constructed from different parts of various samples. Furthermore, dissimilarity representation is employed to select high-quality constructed samples which are used as labeled data to train a specific classifier for those unseen classes. In this way, zero-shot learning is turned into a supervised learning problem. As far as we know, it is the first work to construct samples for ZSL thus, our work is viewed as a baseline for future sample construction methods. Experiments on four benchmark datasets show the superiority of our proposed method.