ELiPS-based Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-Based Encryption

Abstract

Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-Based Encryption (CP-ABE) as an advanced cryptographic method keeps data safe in places like cloud storage and the Internet of Things using pairing-based cryptography. However, it relies on an outdated pairing-based cryptography (PBC) library, making it vulnerable to various attacks. Moreover, it does not meet today's demand for top-level security. Besides, the Efficient Library for Pairing Systems (ELiPS) offers efficient operations related to pairing-based cryptography, delivering high performance while upholding a substantial security standard. To deal with the shortcomings of CP-ABE, we adopt and implement the ELiPS as an efficient library for pairing systems into the CP-ABE framework, namely ELiPSbased CP-ABE. However, CP-ABE requires symmetric pairing, while ELiPS offers asymmetric pairing. To bridge this gap, our approach involves generating a generator g to transform asymmetric to symmetric pairing using Shirase's method, enabling compatibility between ELiPS and CP-ABE. Subsequently, we make several modifications to the CP-ABE framework and choose the appropriate ELiPS functions for integration. Finally, we validate our proposal through experiments involving data access authorization scenarios. Comparing with PBC-based CP-ABE, our ELiPS-based solution demonstrates reduced computational costs across most functions, except decryption. Additionally, our ELiPS-based CP-ABE performs comparably to the competitive MCL library, showcasing its efficiency and effectiveness in modern cryptographic applications.