Ruminations on Attribute-based Encryption

Zhengjun Cao ； Lihua Liu ； Zhenzhen Guo

《International Journal of Electronics and Information Engineering》 8卷1期 (2018/03) Pp. 9-19

https://doi.org/10.6636/IJEIE.201803.8(1).02

摘要

Attribute-based encryption (ABE) which allows one to encrypt messages according to intended receivers' attributes is a kind of one-to-many encryption. Unlike the conventional one-to-one encryption which has no intention to exclude any partners of the intended receiver from obtaining the plaintext, an ABE system tries to exclude all unintended recipients from obtaining the plain- text, despite whether they are partners of some intended recipients. We would like to stress that this requirement for ABE is somewhat hard to meet. An ABE system cannot truly exclude some unintended recipients from decryption because some users can exchange their decryption keys in order to maximize their own interests. Due to this observation, we classify confidentialities into two kinds, strong confidentiality and weak confidentiality, corresponding to full obligations and partial obligations for keeping privacy, respectively. These classifications will be helpful to analyze the behaviors of an intended recipient and revisit the security of different encryption models.

關鍵字

Attribute-based Encryption ； Full Obligations ； One-to-Many Encryption ； Partial Obligations ； Strong Confidentiality ； Weak Confidentiality