The relation and transformation between hierarchical inner product encryption and spatial encryption (Q2448081)

Hierarchial inner product encryption (HIPE) and spatial encryption (SE) are two particular instantiations of functional encryption. In HIPE, a set of hierarchial key vectors \((\vec{v}_1, \dots, \vec{v}_r)\) can be used to obtain the plaintext \(m\) with index vecors \((\vec{x}_1, \dots \vec{x}_h)\) from a corresponding ciphertet if and only if \(r \leq h\) and \(x_i \cdot v_i = 0\) for \(i = 1, \dots,r\). In SE, a key space \(\mathcal{S}\) can be used to obtain the plaintext \(m\) with index vector \(\vec{x}\) from a corresponding ciphertext if and only if \(\vec{x} \in \mathcal{S}\). In this paper, the authors show that HIPE and SE are equivalent in the sense that one system can be constructed easily from one of the other type in such a way that security properties are preserved.