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
