Bounded Ciphertext Policy Attribute Based Encryption

In a ciphertext policy attribute based encryption system, a user’s private key is associated with a set of attributes (describing the user) and an encrypted ciphertext will specify an access policy over attributes. A user will be able to decrypt if and only if his attributes satisfy the ciphertext’s policy. In this work, we present the first construction of a ciphertext-policy attribute based encryption scheme having a security proof based on a number theoretic assumption and supporting advanced access structures. Previous CP-ABE systems could either support only very limited access structures or had a proof of security only in the generic group model. Our construction can support access structures which can be represented by a bounded size access tree with threshold gates as its nodes. The bound on the size of the access trees is chosen at the time of the system setup. Our security proof is based on the standard Decisional Bilinear DiffieHellman assumption.