International Association
for Cryptologic Research

Proving security of Hierarchical Identity-Based Encryption (HIBE) and

Attribution Based Encryption scheme is a challenging problem. There are multiple well-known schemes in the literature where the best known (adaptive) security proofs degrade exponentially in the maximum

hierarchy depth. However, we do not have a rigorous understanding of

why better proofs are not known. (For ABE, the analog of hierarchy depth is the maximum number of attributes used in a ciphertext.)

In this work, we define a certain commonly found checkability property on ciphertexts and private keys. Roughly the property states that any two different private keys that are both ``supposed to\'\' decrypt a ciphertext will decrypt it to the same message. We show that any simple black box reduction to a non-interactive assumption for a HIBE or ABE system that contains this property will suffer an exponential degradation of security.