Expressive key-policy attribute-based encryption with constant-size ciphertexts

Abstract

Attribute-based encryption (ABE), as introduced by Sahai and Waters, allows for fine-grained access control on encrypted data. In its key-policy flavor, the primitive enables senders to encrypt messages under a set of attributes and private keys are associated with access structures that specify which ciphertexts the key holder will be allowed to decrypt. In most ABE systems, the ciphertext size grows linearly with the number of ciphertext attributes and the only known exceptions only support restricted forms of threshold access policies. This paper proposes the first key-policy attribute-based encryption (KP-ABE) schemes allowing for non-monotonic access structures (i.e., that may contain negated attributes) and with constant ciphertext size. Towards achieving this goal, we first show that a certain class of identity-based broadcast encryption schemes generically yields monotonic KP-ABE systems in the selective set model. We then describe a new efficient identity-based revocation mechanism that, when combined with a particular instantiation of our general monotonic construction, gives rise to the first truly expressive KP-ABE realization with constant-size ciphertexts. The downside of these new constructions is that private keys have quadratic size in the number of attributes. On the other hand, they reduce the number of pairing evaluations to a constant, which appears to be a unique feature among expressive KP-ABE schemes. © 2011 International Association for Cryptologic Research.