Software Implementation of an Attribute-Based Encryption Scheme

A ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption protocol uses bilinear pairings to provide control access mechanisms, where the set of user's attributes is specified by means of a linear secret sharing scheme. In this paper we present the design of a software cryptographic library that achieves record timings for the computation of a 126-bit security level attribute-based encryption scheme. We developed all the required auxiliary building blocks and compared the computational weight that each of them adds to the overall performance of this protocol. In particular, our single pairing and multi-pairing implementations achieve state-of-the-art time performance at the 126-bit security level.