Enhancing Attribute-Based Encryption With Attribute Hierarchy

Attribute-Based Encryption (ABE) has been envisioned as a promising cryptographic primitive for realizing secure and flexible access control. However, ABE is being criticized for its high scheme overhead as extensive pairing operations are usually required. In this paper, the authors focus on improving the efficiency of ABE by leveraging a previously overlooked fact, i.e., the often-found hierarchy relationships among the attributes that are inherent in many access control scenarios. As the first research effort along this direction, they coin the notion of Hierarchical ABE (HABE), which can be viewed as the generalization of traditional ABE in the sense that both definitions are equal when all attributes are independent.