Inner-product encryption under standard assumptions

Predicate encryption is a generalized notion for public key encryption that enables one to encrypt attributes as well as a message. In this paper, we present a new inner-product encryption (IPE) scheme, as a specialized predicate encryption scheme, whose security relies on the well-known Decision Bilinear Diffie-Hellman (BDH) and Decision Linear assumptions. Our IPE scheme uses prime order groups equipped with a bilinear map and works in both symmetric and asymmetric bilinear maps. Our result is the first construction of IPE under the standard assumptions. Prior to our work, all IPE schemes known to date require non-standard assumptions to prove security, and moreover some of them use composite-order groups. To achieve our goal, we introduce a novel technique for attribute-hiding, which may be of independent interest.