ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on attribute-based signature solutions, which demonstrate a rich type of cryptosystem, called Adaptive-Policy Attribute-Based Cryptosystem (AP-ABC), that is motivated by real-life challenges in access control management. At a high level, one can consider a natural access control system, called Fine-Grained Access Control (FGAC), in which each user is associated with a subset of attributes that specify which type of resources the user can access; each resource is also associated with an access policy that specifies which type of users can access the resource. The AP-ABC is such a cryptographic system to implement FGAC due to the fact that this cryptosystem can deceptively change the protected resources according to access policy. The chapter develops a general framework for constructing attribute-based cryptosystems with encryption, signature, and authentication.
