title: A survey of research progress and development tendency of attribute-based encryption.
abstract: With the development of cryptography, the attribute-based encryption (ABE) draws widespread attention of the researchers in recent years. The ABE scheme, which belongs to the public key encryption mechanism, takes attributes as public key and associates them with the ciphertext or the user's secret key. It is an efficient way to solve open problems in access control scenarios, for example, how to provide data confidentiality and expressive access control at the same time. In this paper, we survey the basic ABE scheme and its two variants: the key-policy ABE (KP-ABE) scheme and the ciphertext-policy ABE (CP-ABE) scheme. We also pay attention to other researches relating to the ABE schemes, including multiauthority, user/attribute revocation, accountability, and proxy reencryption, with an extensive comparison of their functionality and performance. Finally, possible future works and some conclusions are pointed out.
authors.affiliation: State Key Laboratory of Integrated Services Networks, Xidian University, Xi'an 710071, China ; School of Life Science and Technology, Xidian University, Xi'an 710071, China ; Department of Computer Science, Wayne State University, Detroit, MI 48202, USA.
authors.forename: Liaojun
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Pang
authors.affiliation: State Key Laboratory of Integrated Services Networks, Xidian University, Xi'an 710071, China.
authors.forename: Jie
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Yang
authors.affiliation: Department of Computer Science, Communication University of China, Beijing 100024, China.
authors.forename: Zhengtao
authors.initials: Z
authors.lastname: Jiang