CABE: A New Comparable Attribute-Based Encryption Construction with 0-Encoding and 1-Encoding

Attribute-based encryption (ABE) has opened up a popular research topic in cryptography over the past few years. It can be used in various circumstances, as it provides a flexible way to conduct fine-grained data access control. Despite its great advantages in data access control, current ABE based access control system cannot satisfy the requirement well when the system judges the access behavior according to attribute comparison, such as "greater than x" or "less than x", which are called comparable attributes in this paper. In this paper, based on a set of well-designed sub-attributes representing each comparable attribute, we construct a comparable attribute-based encryption scheme (CABE for short) to address the aforementioned problem. The novelty lies in that we provide a more efficient construction based on the generation and management of the sub-attributes with the notion of 0-encoding and 1-encoding. Extensive analysis shows that: Compared with the existing schemes, our scheme drastically decreases the storage, communication and computation overheads, and thus is more efficient in dealing with the applications with comparable attributes.