Dual System Framework in Multilinear Settings and Applications to Fully Secure (Compact) ABE for Unbounded-Size Circuits

We propose a new generic framework for constructing fully secure attribute based encryption (ABE) in multilinear settings. It is applicable in a generic manner to any predicates. Previous generic frameworks of this kind are given only in bilinear group settings, where applicable predicate classes are limited. Our framework provides an abstraction of dual system paradigms over composite-order graded multilinear encoding schemes in a black-box manner. As applications, we propose new fully secure ABE systems for general predicates, namely, ABE for circuits. We obtain two schemes for each of key-policy (KP) and ciphertext-policy (CP) variants of ABE. All of our four fully secure schemes can deal with unbounded-size circuits, while enjoy succinctness, meaning that the key and ciphertext sizes are (less than or) proportional to corresponding circuit sizes. In the CP-ABE case, no scheme ever achieves such properties, even when considering selectively secure systems. Furthermore, our second KP-ABE achieves constant-size ciphertexts, whereas our second CP-ABE achieves constant-size keys. Previous ABE systems for circuits are either selectively secure (Gorbunov et al. STOC’13, Garg et al. Crypto’13, and subsequent works), or semi-adaptively secure (Brakerski and Vaikuntanathan Crypto’16), or fully-secure but not succinct and restricted to bounded-size circuits (Garg et al. ePrint 2014/622, and Garg et al. TCC’16-A).