AKC-Based Revocable ABE Schemes from LWE Assumption

Abstract EN

The emergence of quantum computing threatens many classical cryptographic schemes, leading to the innovations in public-key cryptography for postquantum cryptography primitives and protocols that resist to quantum attacks.

Lattice-based cryptography is considered to be one of the promising mathematical approaches to achieving security resistant to quantum attacks, which could be built on the learning with errors (LWE) problem and its variants.

The fundamental building blocks of protocols for public-key encryption (PKE) and key encapsulation mechanism (KEM) submitted to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) based on LWE and its variants are called key consensus (KC) and asymmetric key consensus (AKC) by Jin et al.

They are powerful tools for constructing PKE schemes.

In this work, we further demonstrate the power of KC/AKC by proposing two special types of PKE schemes, namely, revocable attribute-based encryption (RABE).

To be specific, on the basis of AKC and PKE/KEM protocols submitted to the NIST based on LWE and its variants, combined with full-rank difference, trapdoor on lattices, sampling algorithms, leftover hash lemma, and binary tree structure, we propose two directly revocable ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption (DR-ABE) schemes from LWE, which support flexible threshold access policies on multivalued attributes, achieving user-level and attribute-level user revocation, respectively.

Specifically, the construction of the ciphertext is derived from AKC, and the revocation list is defined and embedded into the ciphertext by the message sender to revoke a user in the user-level revocable scheme or revoke some attributes of a certain user in the attribute-level revocable scheme.

We also discuss how to outsource decryption and reduce the workload for the end user.

Our schemes proved to be secure in the standard model, assuming the hardness of the LWE problem.

The two schemes imply the versatility of KC/AKC.