Attribute-Based Encryption (ABE) scheme as a new cryptography primitive, shows its advantages in fine-grained access control mechanism and one-to-many flexible encryption mode. By conducting an in-depth study, we demonstrate the development trace, major work and research status of ABE. This paper mainly introduces the basic concepts of ABE, analyzes the research problems, namely key abuse, revocation, multi-authorities, and its applications on resource discovery and e-health especially in personal health record in cloud computing environment.