A Bunch of Broken Schemes: A Simple yet Powerful Linear Approach to Analyzing Security of Attribute-Based Encryption

Marloes Venema; Greg Alpár

Paper 2020/460

A Bunch of Broken Schemes: A Simple yet Powerful Linear Approach to Analyzing Security of Attribute-Based Encryption

Marloes Venema

Greg Alpár

Abstract

Verifying security of advanced cryptographic primitives such as attribute-based encryption (ABE) is often difficult. In this work, we show how to break eleven schemes: two single-authority and nine multi-authority (MA) ABE schemes. Notably, we break DAC-MACS, a highly-cited multi-authority scheme, published at TIFS. This suggests that, indeed, verifying security of complex schemes is complicated, and may require simpler tools. The multi-authority attacks also illustrate that mistakes are made in transforming single-authority schemes into multi-authority ones. To simplify verifying security, we systematize our methods to a linear approach to analyzing generic security of ABE. Our approach is not only useful in analyzing existing schemes, but can also be applied during the design and reviewing of new schemes. As such, it can prevent the employment of insecure (MA-)ABE schemes in the future.

Metadata

Available format(s): PDF
Category: Public-key cryptography
Publication info: Published elsewhere. CT-RSA 2021
Keywords: attribute-based encryption cryptanalysis multi-authority attribute-based encryption attacks
Contact author(s): marloes venema @ ru nl
g alpar @ cs ru nl
History: 2022-06-08: last of 2 revisions; 2020-04-24: received; See all versions
Short URL: https://ia.cr/2020/460
License: CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2020/460,
      author = {Marloes Venema and Greg Alpár},
      title = {A Bunch of Broken Schemes: A Simple yet Powerful Linear Approach to Analyzing Security of Attribute-Based Encryption},
      howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2020/460},
      year = {2020},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2020/460}
}