Implementation of an attribute-based encryption scheme based on SM9

Abstract

In recent years, attribute-based encryption (ABE) has been widely applied in mobile computing, cloud computing, and the Internet of things, for supporting flexible and fine-grained access control of sensitive data. In this paper, we present a novel attribute-based encryption scheme that is based on bilinear pairing over Barreto and Naehrig curves (BN-curves). The identity-based encryption scheme SM9, which is a Chinese commercial cryptographic standard and a forthcoming part of ISO/IEC11770-3, has been used as the fundamental building block, and thus we first introduce SM9 and present our SM9 implementation in details. Subsequently, we propose the design and implementation of the ABE scheme. Moreover, we also develop a hybrid ABE for achieving lower ciphertext expansion rate when the size of access structure or plaintext is large. The performance and energy consumption of the implementation of the proposed ABE and its hybrid version are evaluated with a workstation, a PC, a smart phone, and an embedded device. The experimental results indicated that our schemes work well on various computing platforms. Moreover, the proposed schemes and their implementations would benefit developers in building applications that fulfill the regulatory compliance with the Chinese commercial cryptographic standard since there is no existing ABE scheme compatible with any Chinese cryptographic standard.