With quantum computing, traditional methods of encryption have become insufficient. This has led to the need for a transition to more reliable and flexible encryption systems. In this context, we examine the latest approaches to attribute-based encryption ABE schemes based on lattice cryptography and hybrid ones that combine symmetric encryption with public key ABE. These systems give post-quantum security in addition to fine-grained control, adaptive policy dynamic enforcement, and multi-level hierarchical control. We examine the most significant gaps regarding revocation, multi-authority frameworks, and ciphertext-controlled policies using LWE and Ring-LWE. Text length, key management complexity, and system interoperability are practical concerns too. A comparative analysis of five schemes shows each one's strengths and weaknesses. Designating the encryption phase speeds up the key generation process, so we implemented a multithreaded structure to address some of the identified performance constraints. This worked with other researchers designing robust quantum-access-controlled systems.
With quantum computing, traditional methods of encryption have become insufficient. This has led to the need for a transition to more reliable and flexible encryption systems. In this context, we examine the latest approaches to attribute-based encryption ABE schemes based on lattice cryptography and hybrid ones that combine symmetric encryption with public key ABE. These systems give post-quantum security in addition to fine-grained control, adaptive policy dynamic enforcement, and multi-level hierarchical control. We examine the most significant gaps regarding revocation, multi-authority frameworks, and ciphertext-controlled policies using LWE and Ring-LWE. Text length, key management complexity, and system interoperability are practical concerns too. A comparative analysis of five schemes shows each one's strengths and weaknesses. Designating the encryption phase speeds up the key generation process, so we implemented a multithreaded structure to address some of the identified performance constraints. This worked with other researchers designing robust quantum-access-controlled systems.
The rapid advancement of quantum computing threatens to undermine classical cryptographic primitives, creating an urgent need for post-quantum secure alternatives. Lattice-based Attribute-Based Encryption (ABE) has emerged as a promising direction, combining fine-grained access control with quantum resistance derived from lattice assumptions such as Learning With Errors (LWE) and Ring-LWE. This paper presents a systematic literature review of lattice-based ABE schemes published between 2022 and 2025, following the PRISMA methodology to ensure a rigorous and transparent study selection process. From an initial corpus of more than 7,800 studies retrieved across IEEE Xplore, SpringerLink, Elsevier ScienceDirect, MDPI, and Google Scholar, 1,236 studies were screened, resulting in 90 works selected for in-depth qualitative and quantitative synthesis. The review analyzes the evolution of lattice-based ABE in terms of mathematical foundations, security models, performance characteristics, and application domains. Particular emphasis is placed on emerging use cases in cloud computing, the Internet of Things (IoT), healthcare, financial systems, and government compliance, each evaluated against requirements such as revocation support, lightweight design, searchability, and multi-authority governance. Quantitative synthesis reveals uneven feature coverage across the literature: searchability is supported in 45.6% of schemes and lightweight constructions in 36.7%, whereas policy hiding (16.7%) and revocation (22.2%) remain comparatively underexplored. Performance trends indicate ciphertext sizes averaging 5.8 kB per attribute, with only 12% of schemes achieving compact representations below 2 kB. Moreover, fewer than 36% of surveyed constructions provide IND-CCA security, highlighting persistent challenges in achieving robustness against adaptive adversaries. By integrating structured research questions with quantitative trend analysis, this study offers both descriptive and evidence-backed insights into the current state of lattice-based ABE. The findings identify critical gaps in efficiency, security guarantees, and standardization, and inform a forward-looking research roadmap emphasizing lightweight revocation mechanisms, efficient policy hiding, stronger IND-CCA security models, and the need for standardized benchmarking frameworks. This survey thus serves as a comprehensive reference for researchers and practitioners working on post-quantum secure access control systems, particularly in privacy-sensitive domains such as healthcare.
Attribute-based encryption (ABE) cryptography is widely known for its potential to solve the scalability issue of recent public key infrastructure (PKI). It provides a fine-grained access control system with high flexibility and efficiency by labeling the secret key and ciphertext with distinctive attributes. Due to its fine-grained features, the ABE scheme is a protection layer in securing users’ data and privacy in big data processing and analytics. However, quantum computing, new technology on the horizon that will transform the security and privacy environment, has begun to appear. Like the conventional ABE schemes, present cryptography is not excluded from the impacts of quantum technology as they are not made to be quantum-resistant. While most recent surveys generally touched on the generic features of attribute-based encryption schemes such as user revocation, scalability, flexibility, data confidentiality, and scope in pairing-based ABE schemes, this survey investigated quantum-resistant ABE schemes in securing big data. This survey reviews the challenges faced by the recent ABE cryptography in the post-quantum era and highlights its differences from the conventional pairing-based ABE schemes. Subsequently, we defined the criteria of an ideal quantum-resistant ABE scheme. Additionally, existing works on quantum-resistant ABE schemes are reviewed based on their algorithms design, security and functionalities. Lastly, we summarized quantum-resistant ABE schemes’ ongoing challenges and future works.
This article deals with designing an efficient post-quantum lattice based encryption scheme that relies on the multi-authority Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-Based Encryption (CP-ABE). The security of the proposed scheme is based on the hardness of the ring learning with errors (RLWE) problem. The construction of the proposed scheme is done using the Shamir's threshold secret sharing along with the Lagrange interpolation during the key generation and decryption processes in order to achieve the segmentation and restoration of private keys. A comparative study with the existing state of art schemes has been performed to show the feasibility and efficiency of the proposed scheme. Furthermore, experiments on the proposed scheme have been conducted to illustrate the computational time required during the key generation, encryption and decryption processes.
Abstract We address the problem of user fast revocation in the lattice-based Ciphertext Policy Attribute-Based Encryption (CP-ABE) by extending the scheme originally introduced by Zhang and Zhang [Zhang J, Zhang Z. A ciphertext policy attribute-based encryption scheme without pairings . In: International Conference on Information Security and Cryptology. Springer; 2011. p. 324–40. doi: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-34704-7_23 .]. While a lot of work exists on the construction of revocable schemes for CP-ABE based on pairings, works based on lattices are not so common, and – to the best of our knowledge – we introduce the first server-aided revocation scheme in a lattice-based CP-ABE scheme, hence being embedded in a post-quantum secure environment. In particular, we rely on semi-trusted “mediators” to provide a multi-step decryption capable of handling mediation without re-encryption. We comment on the scheme and its application, and we provide performance experiments on a prototype implementation in the Attribute-Based Encryption spin-off library of Palisade to evaluate the overhead compared with the original scheme.
Ciphertext policy attribute-based encryption (CP-ABE) is a promising cryptographic technology that provides fine-grained access control as well as data confidentiality. It enables one sender to encrypt the data for more receivers, and to specify a policy on who can decrypt the ciphertext using his/her attributes alone. However, most existing ABE schemes are constructed on bilinear maps and they cannot resist quantum attacks. In this paper, we propose a multi-authority CP-ABE (MA-CPABE) scheme on ideal lattices which is still secure in post-quantum era. On one hand, multiple attribute authorities are required when user's attributes cannot be managed by a central authority. On the other hand, compared with generic lattice, the ideal lattice has extra algebraic structure and can be used to construct more efficient cryptographic applications. By adding some virtual attributes for each authority, our scheme can support flexible threshold access policy. Security analysis shows that the proposed scheme is secure against chosen plaintext attack (CPA) in the standard model under the ring learning with errors (R-LWE) assumption.
The advent of quantum computing poses a significant threat to traditional cryptographic algorithms, including RSA, Diffie-Hellman, and Elliptic Curve Cryptography, due to the capabilities of quantum algorithms like Shor’s algorithm. Post-quantum cryptography (PQC) has emerged to address these challenges, with lattice-based cryptography (LBC) being a prominent candidate. LBC, underpinned by hard mathematical problems like Learning with Errors (LWE) and Ring-LWE (RLWE), offers robust security against quantum and classical adversaries. In parallel, Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-Based Encryption (CPABE) has become a critical tool for enabling fine-grained access control in data-sharing scenarios, such as secure cloud storage and IoT. While existing CP-ABE implementations rely on bilinear pairings vulnerable to quantum attacks, lattice-based CPABE schemes provide a quantum-resistant alternative. Despite their potential, these schemes face challenges in computational efficiency, collusion resistance, and implementation correctness. Our contributions include a detailed mathematical breakdown of one of the state-of-the-art (SOTA) lattice-based CP-ABE schemes and a novel correctness proof for the same scheme.