International Association
for Cryptologic Research

Attribute-based encryption (ABE) is a popular type of public-key encryption that enforces access control cryptographically, and has spurred the proposal of many use cases. To satisfy the requirements of the setting, tailor-made schemes are often introduced. However, designing secure schemes---as well as verifying that they are secure---is notoriously hard. Several of these schemes have turned out to be broken, making them dangerous to deploy in practice.

To overcome these shortcomings, we introduce ACABELLA. ACABELLA simplifies generating and verifying security proofs for pairing-based ABE schemes. It consists of a framework for security proofs that are easy to verify manually and an automated tool that efficiently generates these security proofs. Creating such security proofs generally takes no more than a few seconds. The output is easy to understand, and the proofs can be verified manually. In particular, the verification of a security proof generated by ACABELLA boils down to performing simple linear algebra.

The ACABELLA tool is open source and also available via a web interface. With its help, experts can simplify their proof process by verifying or refuting the security claims of their schemes and practitioners can get an assurance that the ABE scheme of their choice is secure.