Attribute-based encryption: Applications and future directions

Abstract

This survey focuses on the cryptographic access control technique, attribute-based encryption (ABE), its applications and future directions. Since its inception, there has been a tremendous interest in applying this technique to solve various problems related to access control. Significant research efforts have been devoted to design efficient constructions and operational parameters to suit various applications. The main functionality of ABE is to enforce cryptographic access control with help of policies specified over a set of system defined attributes. A key generator maps the attributes, in an access policy, into encryption and decryption keys for a resource access request. ABE is categorized into Key-Policy ABE (KP-ABE) and Cipher-text Policy ABE (CP-ABE), depending on the approach used to map the attributes to the encryption and decryption keys. Implementations of ABE have relied on mathematical primitives such as elliptic curves, pairing functions, generalized secret sharing notions and on the hardness of problems like computing discrete logarithm and computational Diffie-Hellman problem over elliptic curves. As they are essentially public-key systems, these schemes are usually proven secure under the semantically secure adaptive chosen cipher-text attack (IND-CCA). ABE has been utilized in solving a number of problems in different application domains including network privacy, broadcast encryption for on-demand television programming, health data access control, cloud security, and verifiable computation. In this survey, we discuss the evolution of ABE, covering significant developments in this area, the applications of ABE across various domains, and the future directions for ABE.