Revocable attribute-based encryption from standard lattices

Abstract

Attribute-based encryption (ABE) is an attractive extension of public key encryption, which provides fine-grained and role-based access to encrypted data. In its key-policy flavor, the secret key is associated with an access policy and the ciphertext is marked with a set of attributes. In many practical applications, and in order to address scenarios where users become malicious or their secret keys are compromised, it is necessary to design an efficient revocation mechanism for ABE. However, prior works on revocable key-policy ABE schemes are based on classical number-theoretic assumptions, which are vulnerable to quantum attacks. In this work, we propose the first revocable key-policy ABE scheme that offers an efficient revocation mechanism while maintaining fine-grained access control to encrypted data. Our scheme is based on the learning with errors (LWE) problem, which is widely believed to be quantum-resistant. Our scheme supports polynomial-depth policy function and has short secret keys, where the size of the keys depends only on the depth of the supported policy function. Furthermore, we prove that our scheme satisfies selective revocation list security in the standard model under the LWE assumption.