Abstract
Attribute-based authentication (ABA) is a way to authenticate users via attributes which are the properties of those to be authenticated, for example, resources, contextual information (time, location, etc.) or their combination. In ABA schemes, attributes instead of identity are requested to be presented or even evidence showing that users own the required attributes is enough, so it is more flexible and privacy-preserving compared with traditional identity-based authentication. In this paper, we first explain the general structure and security requirements of ABA schemes, and then give an example to demonstrate their cryptographic construction. Next, we analyze recent work and discuss future research topics on the construction of ABA schemes, including attribute tree building, cryptographic construction, security models, hierarchy, traceability and revocation.
Highlights
Authentication is usually required before resource accessing and used as part of access control, such as attribute-based access control [1]
There has not been much work focused on Attribute-based authentication (ABA) revocation, but it is well studied in group signatures, identity-based encryption (IBE) [29] and attribute-based encryption (ABE) [30, 31, 33].We will consider revocation methods that can be used in ABA schemes and discuss some of them
The main purpose of this paper is to review some work in ABA schemes, discuss open problems and inspire more researches in ABA scheme construction and designing
Summary
Authentication is usually required before resource accessing and used as part of access control, such as attribute-based access control [1]. In ABA schemes, the authentication of a user is usually triggered by the user's request for some service. If the user owns the requested attributes, it sends back evidence to the service provider, where the evidence is usually a signature. Researches about ABA schemes can generally be divided into several fields, including system structures [4, 6], cryptographic construction and security requirements [3, 8], and policy specification [5] and so on. A specific example about how attribute trees and ABA schemes are constructed is given. The last section is a brief conclusion about the work in this paper
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