Paper 2024/947

A Modular Approach to Registered ABE for Unbounded Predicates

Abstract

Registered attribute-based encryption (Reg-ABE), introduced by Hohenberger et al. (Eurocrypt’23), emerges as a pivotal extension of attribute-based encryption (ABE), aimed at mitigating the key-escrow problem. Although several Reg-ABE schemes with black-box use of cryptography have been proposed so far, there remains a significant gap in the class of achievable predicates between vanilla ABE and Reg-ABE. To narrow this gap, we propose a modular framework for constructing Reg-ABE schemes for a broader class of predicates. Our framework is a Reg-ABE analog of the predicate transformation framework for ABE introduced by Attrapadung (Eurocrypt’19) and later refined by Attrapadung and Tomida (Asiacrypt’20) to function under the standard MDDH assumption. As immediate applications, our framework implies the following new Reg-ABE schemes under the standard MDDH assumption: – the first Reg-ABE scheme for (non-)monotone span programs with the traditional completely unbounded property. – the first Reg-ABE scheme for general non-monotone span programs (also with the completely unbounded property) as defined in the case of vanilla ABE by Attrapadung and Tomida (Asiacrypt’20). Here, the term “completely unbounded” signifies the absence of restrictions on attribute sets for users and policies associated with ciphertexts. From a technical standpoint, we first substantially modify pair encoding schemes (PES), originally devised for vanilla ABE by Attrapadung (Eurocrypt’14), to make them compatible with Reg-ABE. Subsequently, we present a series of predicate transformations through which we can construct complex predicates, particularly those with an “unbounded” characteristic, starting from simple ones. Finally, we define new properties of PES necessary for constructing Reg-ABE schemes and prove that these properties are preserved through the transformations. This immediately implies that we can obtain Reg-ABE schemes for any predicates derived via predicate transformations.