A versatile cryptographic toolkit for flexible access control

Many data driven networks have been developed so that data can be collected and shared for bettering our life. Various cryptosystems are presented to address security and privacy issues in such emerging networks. Observing that implementing various cryptographic schemes separately in one system leads to undesirable heavy development and management overheads, we create a versatile cryptographic toolkit from Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-Based Encryption (CP-ABE) systems. Our toolkit supports attributes, indices, and identities based access control. We achieve this goal by converting some CP-ABE schemes into conventional Broadcast Encryption (BE) and Identity-Based Broadcast Encryption (IBBE) schemes. By configuring the system parameters, one can further obtain conventional Public Key Encryption and Identity-Based Encryption systems.