International Association
for Cryptologic Research

We propose an efficient large-universe multi-authority ciphertext - policy attribute-based encryption system. In a large-universe ABE scheme, any string can be used as an attribute of the system, and these attributes are not necessarily enumerated during setup. In a multi-authority ABE scheme, there is no central authority that distributes the keys to users. Instead, there are several authorities, each of which is responsible for the authorized key distribution of a specific set of attributes. Prior to our work, several schemes have been presented that satisfy one of these two properties but not both.

Our construction achieves maximum versatility by allowing multiple authorities to control the key distribution for an exponential number of attributes. In addition, the ciphertext policies of our system are sufficiently expressive and overcome the restriction

that ``each attribute is used only once\'\' that constrained previous constructions. Besides versatility, another goal of our work is to increase efficiency and practicality. As a result,

we use the significantly faster prime order bilinear groups rather than composite order groups. The construction is non-adaptively secure in the random oracle model under a non-interactive q-type assumption, similar to one used in prior works. Our work

extends existing ``program-and-cancel\'\' techniques to prove security and introduces two new techniques of independent interest for other ABE constructions. We provide an implementation and some benchmarks of our construction in Charm, a programming framework developed for rapid prototyping of cryptographic primitives.