摘要 |
A domain authority 13 for use in a hierarchy of domain authorities in a hierarchical cryptographic system. The domain authority 13 comprises a user secret key generator 21 for generating a user secret key based on a domain secret key and one or more attribute representations, to obtain a user secret key associated with a set of attributes corresponding to the attribute representations, and wherein the domain secret key is based on a domain secret key of a parent domain authority or a root secret key of a root authority of the hierarchy of domain authorities, and wherein the attribute representations are independent of the hierarchy. A decrypter makes use of the user secret key. An encrypter generates ciphertext decryptable by the decrypter. |