Paper 2007/404

Predicate Encryption Supporting Disjunctions, Polynomial Equations, and Inner Products

Jonathan Katz and Amit Sahai and Brent Waters

Abstract

Predicate encryption is a new paradigm generalizing, among other things, identity-based encryption. In a predicate encryption scheme, secret keys correspond to predicates and ciphertexts are associated with attributes; the secret key SK_f corresponding to the predicate f can be used to decrypt a ciphertext associated with attribute I if and only if f(I)=1. Constructions of such schemes are currently known for relatively few classes of predicates. We construct such a scheme for predicates corresponding to the evaluation of inner products over N (for some large integer N). This, in turn, enables constructions in which predicates correspond to the evaluation of disjunctions, polynomials, CNF/DNF formulae, or threshold predicates (among others). Besides serving as what we feel is a significant step forward in the theory of predicate encryption, our results lead to a number of applications that are interesting in their own right.