Paper 2009/293

Enhancing Attribute-based Encryption with Attribute Hierarchy

Jin Li, Qian Wang, Cong Wang, and Kui Ren

Abstract

Attribute-based encryption (ABE) has been envisioned as a promising cryptographic primitive for realizing secure and flexible access control. However, ABE is being criticized for its high scheme overhead as extensive pairing operations are usually required. In this paper, we focus on improving the efficiency of ABE by leveraging a previously overlooked fact, i.e., the often-found hierarchical relationships among the attributes that are inherent to many access control scenarios. As the first research effort along this direction, we coin the notion of hierarchical ABE (\textsf{HABE}), which can be viewed as the generalization of traditional ABE in the sense that both definitions are equal when all attributes are independent. We further give a concrete \textsf{HABE} construction considering a tree hierarchy among the attributes, which is provably secure. More importantly, our construction exhibits significant improvements over the traditional ABE when attribute hierarchies exist.

Metadata
Available format(s)
PDF PS
Category
Public-key cryptography
Publication info
Published elsewhere. Unknown where it was published
Keywords
Attribute-BasedHierarchyEncryptionAccess ControlPairing
Contact author(s)
jli25 @ iit edu
History
2009-06-24: received
Short URL
https://ia.cr/2009/293
License
Creative Commons Attribution
CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2009/293,
      author = {Jin Li and Qian Wang and Cong Wang and Kui Ren},
      title = {Enhancing Attribute-based Encryption with Attribute Hierarchy},
      howpublished = {Cryptology ePrint Archive, Paper 2009/293},
      year = {2009},
      note = {\url{https://eprint.iacr.org/2009/293}},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2009/293}
}
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