Verifiable and Fair Registered Attribute-Based Multi-Hop Proxy Re-Encryption Scheme for LLM Agents

Abstract

As Large Language Model (LLM) agents emerge as intelligent coordinators, they intensify the demand for secure sharing and forwarding of sensitive data in data-driven systems. Existing Attribute-Based Proxy Re-Encryption (ABPRE) offers fine-grained access control and secure data forwarding, but suffers from the key escrow problem and lacks efficient verifiability and fairness guarantees. In this paper, we propose the first Verifiable and Fair Registered ABPRE (VF-RABPRE) scheme to eliminate reliance on trusted authorities and support multi-hop re-encryption for flexible multi-agent data sharing. To ensure efficient verifiability and fairness, we combine a lightweight verifiable tag and a non-interactive zero-knowledge proof to detect misbehavior of the proxy and prevent false accusations. As a trade-off between security and overhead, we design a more secure fairness mechanism that does not reveal plaintext using zero-knowledge Succinct Non-interactive Arguments of Knowledge (zkSNARK). Additionally, we extend VF-RABPRE with dynamic user registration and outsourced decryption, supporting flexible registration and efficient decryption for data users. Finally, we formally prove the security of our scheme and implement a prototype to evaluate its performance. Experimental results demonstrate that VF-RABPRE outperforms state-of-the-art ABPRE schemes and achieves practical efficiency, making it well-suited for secure data sharing in scenarios empowered by LLM agents.