An Efficient RSA-Based Pairing-Free Key Policy Attribute-Based Encryption for Lightweight Applications

Applying access control to encrypted data is a crucial aspect of network security. Although Attribute-Based Encryption (ABE) provides a suitable solution, it comes with limitations, primarily its high computational complexity due to the use of pairing operations. In this paper, we propose the first attribute-based encryption scheme based on RSA encryption, which is pairing-free and more efficient than previous pairing-based approaches. This scheme is particularly well-suited for lightweight applications such as those in the Internet of Things (IoT).
The proposed encryption scheme is a Key-Policy Attribute-Based Encryption (KP-ABE) that allows its access policy to be any Boolean function in disjunctive normal form (DNF). Our scheme also addresses the challenge of key revocation, which is often problematic in ABE schemes. The key advantages of our scheme are its efficiency and simplicity compared to other ABE schemes, which typically rely on complex pairing operations. Additionally, we present an Attribute-Based Signature (ABS) scheme based on RSA.