Distributed Multi-authority Attribute-Based Encryption Using Cellular Automata

Abstract

Cellular automata (CA) has attracted the attention of research communities for its applications in the design of symmetric and public-key cryptosystems. The strength of cellular automata lies in its inherent data parallelism, which can help accelerate access control mechanisms, and its information scrambling capabilities, which can enhance the security of the system. Also, the cryptosystems designed using CA do not involve number-theoretic methodologies that incur large computational overhead like traditional cryptosystems. However, existing CA-based cryptosystems encompass a limited set from the set of all possible transition rules indicating the existence of CA cryptosystems which are possibly unbreakable but have not been explored sufficiently. Thus, they have not yet been considered for applications involving fine-grained access control for heterogeneous access to the data. In this paper, we propose a secure distributed multi-authority attribute-based encryption using CA, which has potential applications in cloud systems. Our cryptosystem adopts the concept of multi-authority attribute-based access control where the encryption and attribute distribution use reversible CA, and policy satisfiability is achieved by Turing-complete CA in a distributed environment. We illustrate the practical usability of our proposed cryptosystem, in terms of efficiency and security, by extensive experimental results.