The future of data privacy is the end of compromise. With the world producing data at astounding rates, we need ways to put data to the best use while protecting against breaches and ensuring privacy, data protection and access control. These principles are foundational to attribute-based encryption (ABE)—a novel form of encryption that after years of study is now beginning to be commercially deployed. Compared to the prevailing coarse-grained access model of legacy encryption technologies, in which giving out a secret key essentially amounts to giving access to all the encrypted data, ABE is a more finely tuned approach that grants prescribed access of encrypted data to someone with a matching set of traits. Attribute-based encryption could spell the end of data compromise – Help Net Security