On the Theory and Application of Attribute-Based Cryptography

Description

Attributed-Based Cryptography is an extension of Identity-Based Cryptography allowing a user to encrypt a message under an access structure, say {“CS” AND (“student” OR “faculty”)}, and let any user who is a student or a faculty member in the CS department recover the message, while, as an example, not letting any user affiliated to EE department to decrypt the ciphertext. Attributed-Based Cryptography has many useful applications, especially in cloud computing and social networking. Current social networking sites cannot facilitate their users to any direct control over their own data. Instead, users have to rely upon the centralized social networking servers to enforce access control. This not only introduces privacy concern to users but also incurs scalability issue to the centralized servers as they have to maintain the access control for all of their users. By using attribute-based cryptography, users can have direct control on the data privacy and the access control enforcement is also distributed to each individual user. In addition, data of individuals can be stored on a cloud with untrusted servers without worrying about their confidentiality against malicious cloud providers or other malicious users.As a young and vibrant field in public key cryptography, we observe that attributebased cryptography has promising applications and a wide range of interesting research problems. In this project, we propose to work on a series of problems in this field that include the security against malicious Attribute Authorities (AAs) in Attribute-Based Encryption (ABE) and Attributed-Based Signature (ABS), the formalization and construction of ABE schemes with delegation and revocation, the support of multiple authorities in ABE as well as the application of ABE on Oblivious Transfer with Access Control (AC-OT). We focus our attention on these research problems in attribute-based cryptography because of their technical importance as well as the expertise of our research team.