GLUE: Generalizing Unbounded Attribute-Based Encryption for Flexible Efficiency Trade-Offs

Abstract

Ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption is a versatile primitive that has been considered extensively to securely manage data in practice. Especially completely unbounded schemes are attractive, because they do not restrict the sets of attributes and policies. So far, any such schemes that support negations in the access policy or that have online/offline extensions have an inefficient decryption algorithm. In this work, we propose GLUE (Generalized, Large-universe, Unbounded and Expressive), which is a novel scheme that allows for the efficient implementation of the decryption while allowing the support of both negations and online/offline extensions. We achieve these properties simultaneously by uncovering an underlying dependency between encryption and decryption, which allows for a flexible trade-off in their efficiency. For the security proof, we devise a new technique that enables us to generalize multiple existing schemes. As a result, we obtain a completely unbounded scheme supporting negations that, to the best of our knowledge, outperforms all existing such schemes in the decryption algorithm.