Efficient Construction for Full Black-Box Accountable Authority Identity-Based Encryption

Accountable authority identity-based encryption (A-IBE), as an attractive way to guarantee the user privacy security, enables a malicious private key generator (PKG) to be traced if it generates and re-distributes a user private key. Particularly, an A-IBE scheme achieves full black-box security if it can further trace a decoder box and is secure against a malicious PKG who can access the user decryption results. In PKC\u2711, Sahai and Seyalioglu presented a generic construction for full black-box A-IBE from a primitive called dummy identity-based encryption, which is a hybrid between IBE and attribute-based encryption (ABE). However, as the complexity of ABE, their construction is inefficient and the size of private keys and ciphertexts in their instantiation is linear in the length of user identity. In this paper, we present a new efficient generic construction for full black-box A-IBE from a new primitive called token-based identity-based encryption (TB-IBE), without using ABE. We first formalize the definition and security model for TB-IBE. Subsequently, we show that a TB-IBE scheme satisfying some properties can be converted to a full black-box A-IBE scheme, which is as efficient as the underlying TB-IBE scheme in terms of computational complexity and parameter sizes. Finally, we give an instantiation with the computational complexity as O(1) and the constant size master key pair, private keys, and ciphertexts

Attribute-based encryption for cloud computing access control: A survey

National Research Foundation (NRF) Singapore; AXA Research Fun

Towards Black-Box Accountable Authority IBE with Short Ciphertexts and Private Keys

At Crypto'07, Goyal introduced the concept of Accountable Authority Identity-Based Encryption as a convenient tool to reduce the amount of trust in authorities in Identity-Based Encryption. In this model, if the Private Key Generator (PKG) maliciously re-distributes users' decryption keys, it runs the risk of being caught and prosecuted. Goyal proposed two constructions: the first one is efficient but can only trace well-formed decryption keys to their source; the second one allows tracing obfuscated decryption boxes in a model (called weak black-box model) where cheating authorities have no decryption oracle. The latter scheme is unfortunately far less efficient in terms of decryption cost and ciphertext size. In this work, we propose a new construction that combines the efficiency of Goyal's first proposal with a very simple weak black-box tracing mechanism. Our scheme is described in the selective-ID model but readily extends to meet all security properties in the adaptive-ID sense, which is not known to be true for prior black-box schemes.Comment: 32 page

A Survey of Research Progress and Development Tendency of Attribute-Based Encryption

With the development of cryptography, the attribute-based encryption (ABE) draws widespread attention of the researchers in recent years. The ABE scheme, which belongs to the public key encryption mechanism, takes attributes as public key and associates them with the ciphertext or the user’s secret key. It is an efficient way to solve open problems in access control scenarios, for example, how to provide data confidentiality and expressive access control at the same time. In this paper, we survey the basic ABE scheme and its two variants: the key-policy ABE (KP-ABE) scheme and the ciphertext-policy ABE (CP-ABE) scheme. We also pay attention to other researches relating to the ABE schemes, including multiauthority, user/attribute revocation, accountability, and proxy reencryption, with an extensive comparison of their functionality and performance. Finally, possible future works and some conclusions are pointed out

A2BE: Accountable Attribute-Based Encryption for Abuse Free Access Control

As a recently proposed public key primitive, attribute-based encryption (ABE) (including Ciphertext-policy ABE (CP-ABE) and Key-policy ABE (KP-ABE)) is a highly promising tool for secure access control. In this paper, the issue of key abuse in ABE is formulated and addressed. Two kinds of key abuse problems are considered, i) illegal key sharing among colluding users and ii) misbehavior of the semi-trusted attribute authority including illegal key (re-)distribution. Both problems are extremely important as in an ABE-based access control system, the attribute private keys directly imply users\u27 privileges to the protected resources. To the best knowledge of ours, such key abuse problems exist in all current ABE schemes as the attribute private keys assigned to the users are never designed to be linked to any user specific information except the commonly shared user attributes. To be concrete, we focus on the prevention of key abuse in CP-ABE in this paper \footnote{Our technique can easily be extended to KP-ABE as well.}. The notion of accountable CP-ABE (CP-A$^2$BE, in short) is first proposed to prevent illegal key sharing among colluding users. The accountability for user is achieved by embedding additional user specific information in the attribute private key issued to the user. To further obtain accountability for the attribute authority as well, the notion of strong CP-A$^2$BE is proposed, allowing each attribute private key to be linked to the corresponding user\u27s secret that is unknown to the attribute authority. We show how to construct such a strong CP-A$^2$BE and prove its security based on the computational Diffie-Hellman assumption. Finally, we show how to utilize the new technique to solve some open problems existed in the previous accountable identity-based encryption schemes

Anonymous and Adaptively Secure Revocable IBE with Constant Size Public Parameters

In Identity-Based Encryption (IBE) systems, key revocation is non-trivial. This is because a user's identity is itself a public key. Moreover, the private key corresponding to the identity needs to be obtained from a trusted key authority through an authenticated and secrecy protected channel. So far, there exist only a very small number of revocable IBE (RIBE) schemes that support non-interactive key revocation, in the sense that the user is not required to interact with the key authority or some kind of trusted hardware to renew her private key without changing her public key (or identity). These schemes are either proven to be only selectively secure or have public parameters which grow linearly in a given security parameter. In this paper, we present two constructions of non-interactive RIBE that satisfy all the following three attractive properties: (i) proven to be adaptively secure under the Symmetric External Diffie-Hellman (SXDH) and the Decisional Linear (DLIN) assumptions; (ii) have constant-size public parameters; and (iii) preserve the anonymity of ciphertexts---a property that has not yet been achieved in all the current schemes

Pre-Constrained Encryption

In all existing encryption systems, the owner of the master secret key has the ability to decrypt all ciphertexts. In this work, we propose a new notion of pre-constrained encryption (PCE) where the owner of the master secret key does not have "full" decryption power. Instead, its decryption power is constrained in a pre-specified manner during the system setup. We present formal definitions and constructions of PCE, and discuss societal applications and implications to some well-studied cryptographic primitives

Ensuring Accountability and Outsourced Decryption in IoT Systems using Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-Based Encryption

Attribute based cryptography enhances the chances of secure communication on large scale. There are several features of attribute based encryption which have been proposed as different protocols. Most of these are suitable for access control in large systems like cloud services. Very few protocols focus on reducing the computational overhead for lower end devices like Internet of Things sensors and actuators. Hence, it is desirable to have a mix of features in protocols for IoT architecture. Our protocol enforces accountability of different parties involved while reducing the computational overhead during decryption on miniature devices. We prove that our protocol is RCCA-secure in selective security model and achieve accountability and unlinkability

Efficient Registration-Based Encryption

Registration-based encryption (RBE) was recently introduced as an alternative to identity-based encryption (IBE), to resolve the key-escrow problem: In RBE, the trusted authority is substituted with a weaker entity, called the key curator, who has no knowledge of any secret key. Users generate keys on their own and then publicly register their identities and their corresponding public keys to the key curator. RBE is a promising alternative to IBE, retaining many of its advantages while removing the key-escrow problem, the major drawback of IBE. Unfortunately, all existing constructions of RBE use cryptographic schemes in a non black-box way, which makes them prohibitively expensive. It has been estimated that the size of an RBE ciphertext would be in the order of terabytes (though no RBE has even been implemented). In this work, we propose a new approach to construct RBE, from standard assumptions in bilinear groups. Our scheme is black-box and it is concretely highly efficient—a ciphertext is 914 bytes. To substantiate this claim, we implemented a prototype of our scheme and we show that it scales to millions of users. The public parameters of the scheme are on the order of kilobytes. The most expensive operation (registration) takes at most a handful of seconds, whereas the encryption and decryption runtimes are on the order of milliseconds. This is the first-ever implementation of an RBE scheme and demonstrates that the practical deployment of RBE is already possible with today’s hardware