Symmetric predicate encryption schemes support a rich class of predicates over keyword ciphertexts while preserving both keyword privacy and predicate privacy. Most of these schemes treat each keyword as the smallest unit to be processed in the generation of ciphertexts and predicate tokens. To extend the class of predicates, we treat each symbol of a keyword as the smallest unit to be processed. In this letter, we propose a novel encoding to construct a symmetric inner-product encryption scheme for position-aware symbol-based predicates. The resulting scheme can be applied to a number of secure filtering and online storage services.

The concept of dual pairing vector spaces (DPVS) was introduced by Okamoto and Takashima in 2009, and it has been employed in various applications, functional encryption (FE) including attribute-based encryption (ABE) and inner-product encryption (IPE) as well as attribute-based signatures (ABS), generic conversion from composite-order group based schemes to prime-order group based ones and public-key watermarking. In this paper, we show the concept of DPVS, the major applications to FE and the key techniques employed in these applications. This paper presents them with placing more emphasis on plain and intuitive descriptions than formal preciseness.

This paper proposes an inner-product encryption (IPE) scheme, which achieves selectively fully-attribute-hiding security in the standard model almost tightly reduced from the decisional linear (DLIN) assumption, and whose ciphertext is almost the shortest among the existing (weakly/fully) attribute-hiding IPE schemes, i.e., it consists of n+4 elements of G and 1 element of GT for a prime-order symmetric bilinear group (G, GT), where n is the dimension of attribute/predicate vectors. We also present a variant of the proposed IPE scheme that enjoys shorter public and secret keys with preserving the security. A hierarchical IPE (HIPE) scheme can be realized that has short ciphertexts and selectively fully-attribute-hiding security almost tightly reduced from the DLIN assumption.