Implementation and evaluation of a lattice-based key-policy ABE scheme

Official URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/TIFS.2017.2779427

In this paper, we report on our implementation of a lattice-based key-policy attribute-based encryption (KP-ABE) scheme, which uses short secret keys. The particular KP-ABE scheme can be used directly for attribute-based access control applications, as well as a building block in more involved applications and cryptographic schemes, such as audit log encryption, targeted broadcast encryption, functional encryption, and program obfuscation. We adapt a recently proposed KP-ABE scheme based on the learning with errors (LWE) problem to a more efficient scheme based on the ring learning with errors (RLWE) problem, and demonstrate an implementation that can be used in practical applications. Our state-of-theart implementation on graphics processing units shows that the homomorphic public key and ciphertext evaluation operations, which dominate the execution time of the KP-ABE scheme, can be performed in a reasonably short amount of time. Our practicality results also hold when scaled to a relatively large number of attributes. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first KP-ABE implementation that supports both ciphertext and public key homomorphism, and the only experimental practicality results reported in this paper.