Paper 2017/601

Implementation and Evaluation of a Lattice-Based Key-Policy ABE Scheme

Wei Dai, Yarkın Doröz, Yuriy Polyakov, Kurt Rohloff, Hadi Sajjadpour, Erkay Savaş, and Berk Sunar

Abstract

In this paper, we report on our implementation of a lattice-based Key-Policy Attribute-Based Encryption (KP-ABE) scheme, which uses short secret keys. The particular KP-ABE scheme can be used directly for Attribute-Based Access Control (ABAC) applications, as well as a building block in more involved applications and cryptographic schemes such as audit log encryption, targeted broadcast encryption, functional encryption, and program obfuscation. We adapt a recently proposed KP-ABE scheme [1] based on the Learning With Errors (LWE) problem to a more efficient scheme based on the Ring Learning With Errors (RLWE) problem, and demonstrate an implementation that can be used in practical applications. Our state-of-the-art implementation on graphics processing units (GPUs) shows that the homomorphic public key and ciphertext evaluation operations, which dominate the execution time of the KP-ABE scheme, can be performed in a reasonably short amount of time. Our practicality results also hold when scaled to a relatively large number of attributes. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first KP-ABE implementation that supports both ciphertext and public key homomorphism and the only experimental practicality results reported in the literature.