ETSI Security Week: ETSI Standardisation in Advanced Cryptography

The academic community and the industry thrive with innovative cryptography that enable advanced access control and secure communication use cases. Functional Encryption is one such family of schemes. This session will introduce Attribute-Based Encryption (ABE), Identity-Based Encryption (IBE), and their related standardisation efforts in ETSI, including a quantum-safe hierarchical IBE scheme. ABE is a cryptographic mechanism that enforces access control solely on the mathematical level with strong security guarantees. A main incentive using ABE is to provide a proper and versatile replacement for software-only access-control mechanisms that need to embed all trust into (often seen to be error-prone) software components by design. Applications of ABE in EU research projects and ETSI TS 103 532 will be presented. IBE is a form of asymmetric encryption in which the participants’ identities (such as a phone number or an email address) serve as public keys. Participants wishing to securely communicate can do so directly, without having to aggree on keying material beforehand. IBE is well suited for the seamless onboarding of participants in cases where the task of establishing secure communications can be delegated to a trusted third party. The properties of IBE schemes will be summarised and the study conducted in ETSI TR 103 719 will be presented. As quantum computing poses a threat to the long-term security of most of the currently used encryption mechanisms, this session will also present ongoing efforts in the development of quantum-safe IBE, with a focus on a hierarchical IBE scheme based on structured lattices and described in ETSI TR 103 618.