Paper 2011/255 Original: eprint.iacr.org/2011/255 ↗

Hiding the Policy in Cryptographic Access Control

Abstract

Recently, cryptographic access control has received a lot of attention, mainly due to the availability of efficient \emph{Attribute-Based Encryption (ABE)} schemes. ABE allows to get rid of a trusted reference monitor by enforcing access rules in a cryptographic way. However, ABE has a privacy problem: The access policies are sent in clear along with the ciphertexts. Further generalizing the idea of policy-hiding in cryptographic access control, we introduce \emph{policy anonymity} where -- similar to the well-understood concept of $k$-anonymity -- the attacker can only see a large set of possible policies that might have been used to encrypt, but is not able to identify the one that was actually used. We show that using a concept from graph theory we can extend a known ABE construction to achieve the desired privacy property.