Interesting concept this new research from UCLA called functional cryptography. Apparently the key is a function of peoples "attributes" and not having the specific key itself - as far as I can understand. I would guess that defining these attributes might be tough... Seems like they are addressing key management, authentication and aspects of sharing keys without going for a full blown PKI infrastructure...

Be interesting to find out more about this area.

However, one aspect of this did strike me as sysnergestic to my views of data centric/information centric security - the attributes and keys are held within the data itself and resides with the data...