Generic Negation of Pair Encodings

Attribute-based encryption (ABE) is a cryptographic primitive which supports fine-grained access control on encrypted data, making it an appealing building block for many applications. Pair encodings (Attrapadung, EUROCRYPT 2014) are simple primitives that can be used for constructing fully secure ABE schemes associated to a predicate relative to the encoding. We propose a generic transformation that takes any pair encoding scheme (PES) for a predicate $P$ and produces a PES for its negated predicate $\bar{P}$ . This construction finally solves a problem that was open since 2015. Our techniques bring new insight to the expressivity and generality of PES and can be of independent interest. We also provide, to the best of our knowledge, the first pair encoding scheme for negated doubly spatial encryption (obtained with our transformation) and explore several other consequences of our results

Functional Encryption for Computational Hiding in Prime Order Groups via Pair Encodings

Lewko and Waters introduced the computational hiding technique in Crypto\u2712. In their technique, two computational assumptions that achieve selective and co-selective security proofs lead to adaptive security of an encryption scheme. Later, pair encoding framework was introduced by Attrapadung in Eurocrypt\u2714. The pair encoding framework generalises the computational hiding technique for functional encryption (FE). It has been used to achieve a number of new FE schemes such as FE for regular languages and unbounded attribute based encryption allowing multi-use of attributes. Nevertheless, the generalised construction of Attrapadung\u27s pair encoding for those schemes is adaptively secure only in composite order groups, which leads to efficiency loss. It remains a challenging task to explore constructions in prime order groups for gaining efficiency improvement, which leaves the research gap in the existing literature. In this work, we aim to address this drawback by proposing a new generalised construction for pair encodings in prime order groups. Our construction will lead to a number of new FE schemes in prime order groups, which have been previously introduced only in composite order groups by Attrapadung

Functional Encryption for Computational Hiding in Prime Order Groups via Pair Encodings

Lewko and Waters introduced the computational hiding technique in Crypto\u2712. In their technique, two computational assumptions that achieve selective and co-selective security proofs lead to adaptive security of an encryption scheme. Later, pair encoding framework was introduced by Attrapadung in Eurocrypt\u2714. The pair encoding framework generalises the computational hiding technique for functional encryption (FE). It has been used to achieve a number of new FE schemes such as FE for regular languages and unbounded attribute based encryption allowing multi-use of attributes. Nevertheless, the generalised construction of Attrapadung\u27s pair encoding for those schemes is adaptively secure only in composite order groups, which leads to efficiency loss. It remains a challenging task to explore constructions in prime order groups for gaining efficiency improvement, which leaves the research gap in the existing literature. In this work, we aim to address this drawback by proposing a new generalised construction for pair encodings in prime order groups. Our construction will lead to a number of new FE schemes in prime order groups, which have been previously introduced only in composite order groups by Attrapadung

Improved Dual System ABE in Prime-Order Groups via Predicate Encodings

We present a modular framework for the design of efficient adaptively secure attribute-based encryption (ABE) schemes for a large class of predicates under the standard k-Lin assumption in prime-order groups; this is the first uniform treatment of dual system ABE across different predicates and across both composite and prime-order groups. Via this framework, we obtain concrete efficiency improvements for several ABE schemes. Our framework has three novel components over prior works: (i) new techniques for simulating composite-order groups in prime-order ones, (ii) a refinement of prior encodings framework for dual system ABE in composite-order groups, (iii) an extension to weakly attribute-hiding predicate encryption (which includes anonymous identity-based encryption as a special case)

Dual System Encryption via Predicate Encodings

We introduce the notion of predicate encodings, an information-theoretic primitive reminiscent of linear secret-sharing that in addition, satisfies a novel notion of reusability. Using this notion, we obtain a unifying framework for adaptively-secure public-index predicate encryption schemes for a large class of predicates. Our framework relies on Waters’ dual system encryption methodology (Crypto ’09), and encompass the identity-based encryption scheme of Lewko and Waters (TCC ’10), and the attribute-based encryption scheme of Lewko et al. (Eurocrypt ’10). In addition, we obtain several concrete improvements over prior works. Our work offers a novel interpretation of dual system encryption as a methodology for amplifying a one-time private-key primitive (i.e. predicate encodings) into a many-time public-key primitive (i.e. predicate encryption)

Efficient and Generic Transformations for Chosen-Ciphertext Secure Predicate Encryption

Predicate encryption (PE) is a type of public-key encryption that captures many useful primitives such as attribute-based encryption (ABE). Although much progress has been made to generically achieve security against chosen-plaintext attacks (CPA) efficiently, in practice, we also require security against chosen-ciphertext attacks (CCA). Because achieving CCA-security on a case-by-case basis is a complicated task, several generic conversion methods have been proposed. However, these conversion methods may incur a significant efficiency trade-off. Notably, for ciphertext-policy ABE, all generic conversion methods provide a significant overhead in the key generation, encryption or decryption algorithm. Additionally, many generic conversion techniques use one-time signatures to achieve authenticity, which are also known to significantly impact the efficiency. In this work, we present a new approach to achieving CCA-security as generically and efficiently as possible, by splitting the CCA-conversion in two steps. The predicate of the scheme is first extended in a certain way, which is then used to achieve CCA-security generically e.g., by combining it with a hash function. To facilitate the first step efficiently, we also propose a novel predicate-extension transformation for a large class of pairing-based PE---covered by the pair and the predicate encodings frameworks---which incurs only a small constant overhead for all algorithms. In particular, this yields the most efficient generic CCA-conversion for ciphertext-policy ABE

Simplifying Design and Analysis of Complex Predicate Encryption Schemes

Wee (TCC\u2714) and Attrapadung (Eurocrypt\u2714) introduced predicate and pair encodings, respectively, as a simple way to construct and analyze attribute-based encryption schemes, or more generally predicate encryption. However, many schemes do not satisfy the simple information theoretic property proposed in those works, and thus require much more complicated analysis. In this paper, we propose a new simple property for pair encodings called symbolic security. Proofs that pair encodings satisfy this property are concise and easy to verify. We show that this property is inherently tied to the security of predicate encryption schemes by arguing that any scheme which is not trivially broken must satisfy it. Then we use this property to discuss several ways to convert between pair encodings to obtain encryption schemes with different properties like small ciphertexts or keys. Finally, we show that any pair encoding satisfying our new property can be used to construct a fully secure predicate encryption scheme. The resulting schemes are secure under a new q-type assumption which we show follows from several of the assumptions used to construct such schemes in previous work

Advances in Functional Encryption

Functional encryption is a novel paradigm for public-key encryption that enables both fine-grained access control and selective computation on encrypted data, as is necessary to protect big, complex data in the cloud. In this thesis, I provide a brief introduction to functional encryption, and an overview of my contributions to the area

Unbounded Dynamic Predicate Compositions in ABE from Standard Assumptions

At Eurocrypt\u2719, Attrapadung presented several transformations that dynamically compose a set of attribute-based encryption (ABE) schemes for simpler predicates into a new ABE scheme for more expressive predicates. Due to the powerful unbounded and modular nature of his compositions, many new ABE schemes can be obtained in a systematic manner. However, his approach heavily relies on $q$-type assumptions, which are not standard. Devising such powerful compositions from standard assumptions was left as an important open problem. In this paper, we present a new framework for constructing ABE schemes that allow unbounded and dynamic predicate compositions among them, and show that the adaptive security of these composed ABE will be preserved by relying only on the standard matrix Diffie-Hellman (MDDH) assumption. This thus resolves the open problem posed by Attrapadung. As for applications, we obtain various ABEs that are the first such instantiations of their kinds from standard assumptions.These include the following adaptively secure large-universe ABEs for Boolean formulae under MDDH: - The first completely unbounded monotone key-policy (KP)/ciphertext-policy (CP) ABE. Such ABE was recently proposed, but only for the KP and small-universe flavor (Kowalczyk and Wee, Eurocrypt\u2719). - The first completely unbounded non-monotone KP/CP-ABE. Especially, our ABEs support a new type of non-monotonicity that subsumes previous two types of non-monotonicity, namely, by Ostrovsky et al. (CCS\u2707) and by Okamoto and Takashima (CRYPTO\u2710). - The first (non-monotone) KP and CP-ABE with constant-size ciphertexts and secret keys, respectively. - The first KP and CP-ABE with constant-size secret keys and ciphertexts, respectively. At the core of our framework lies a new partially symmetric design of the core 1-key 1-ciphertext oracle component called Key Encoding Indistinguishability, which exploits the symmetry so as to obtain compositions