Data User-Based Attribute-Based Encryption
This addresses privacy and trust concerns for data users in applications where they do not trust external authorities, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing ABE frameworks.
The paper tackles the trust issue in Attribute-Based Encryption (ABE) by introducing Data User-Based ABE (DU-ABE), a decentralized model managed by data users themselves, eliminating the need for a central authority.
Attribute-Based Encryption (ABE) has emerged as an information-centric public-key cryptographic system which allows a data owner to share data, according to access policy, with multiple data users based on the attributes they possess, without knowing their identities. In the original ABE schemes, a central authority administrates the system and issues secret keys to data users based on their attributes and both the owner and users need to trust a specific CA. However, in certain real-world applications, the data users would not trust anyone but themselves. For such situations, we introduce a new decentralization model of ABE, termed Data User-based ABE (DU-ABE), which is managed jointly by the data users. DU-ABE is the first decentralized ABE scheme that replaces the authorities with the data users without employing any other extra entities.