Semantic Attribute-Based Encryption: A framework for combining ABE schemes with semantic technologies

Attribute-Based Encryption (ABE) is a cryptographic solution to protect resources in a fine-grained manner based on a set of public attributes. This is similar to attribute-based access control schemes in the sense that both rely on public attributes and access control policies to grant access to resources. However, ABE schemes do not consider the semantics of attributes provided by users or required by access structures. Such semantics not only improve the functionality by making proper access decisions but also enable cross-domain interoperability by making users from one domain able to access and use resources of other domains. This paper proposes a Semantic ABE (SABE) framework by augmenting a classical Ciphertext-Policy ABE (CP-ABE) scheme with semantic technologies using a generic procedure by which any CP-ABE scheme can be extended to an SABE. The proposed SABE framework is implemented in Java and the source code is publicly available. The experiment results confirm that the performance of the proposed framework is promising.