ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the foundations of Attribute-Based Encryption (ABE) schemes. It introduces Attribute-Based Access Control (ABAC), and describes motivations of using ABE-based ABAC solutions and their facing issues. The booming of ABE started in the seminar work in 2007’s “Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-Based Encryption, in which the data access policies are naturally incorporated into crypto key generations. ABAC is an emerging form of access control that is starting to garner interest in both recent academic literature and industry applications. In public key encryption schemes, each user has a randomly generated public/private key pair. The private key is kept secret by the user, and the public key is published to the public. Using Attribute-Based Encryption, the access control policies can be incorporated into the ciphertext, and thus the Access Control is mobile.
