3 research outputs found
Still Wrong Use of Pairings in Cryptography
Several pairing-based cryptographic protocols are recently proposed with a
wide variety of new novel applications including the ones in emerging
technologies like cloud computing, internet of things (IoT), e-health systems
and wearable technologies. There have been however a wide range of incorrect
use of these primitives. The paper of Galbraith, Paterson, and Smart (2006)
pointed out most of the issues related to the incorrect use of pairing-based
cryptography. However, we noticed that some recently proposed applications
still do not use these primitives correctly. This leads to unrealizable,
insecure or too inefficient designs of pairing-based protocols. We observed
that one reason is not being aware of the recent advancements on solving the
discrete logarithm problems in some groups. The main purpose of this article is
to give an understandable, informative, and the most up-to-date criteria for
the correct use of pairing-based cryptography. We thereby deliberately avoid
most of the technical details and rather give special emphasis on the
importance of the correct use of bilinear maps by realizing secure
cryptographic protocols. We list a collection of some recent papers having
wrong security assumptions or realizability/efficiency issues. Finally, we give
a compact and an up-to-date recipe of the correct use of pairings.Comment: 25 page
Generating searchable public-key ciphertexts with hidden structures for fast keyword search
Existing semantically secure public-key searchable encryption schemes take search time linear with the total number of the ciphertexts. This makes retrieval from large-scale databases prohibitive. To alleviate this problem, this paper proposes searchable public-key ciphertexts with hidden structures (SPCHS) for keyword search as fast as possible without sacrificing semantic security of the encrypted keywords. In SPCHS, all keyword-searchable ciphertexts are structured by hidden relations, and with the search trapdoor corresponding to a keyword, the minimum information of the relations is disclosed to a search algorithm as the guidance to find all matching ciphertexts efficiently. We construct an SPCHS scheme from scratch in which the ciphertexts have a hidden star-like structure. We prove our scheme to be semantically secure in the random oracle (RO) model. The search complexity of our scheme is dependent on the actual number of the ciphertexts containing the queried keyword, rather than the number of all ciphertexts. Finally, we present a generic SPCHS construction from anonymous identity-based encryption and collision-free full-identity malleable identity-based key encapsulation mechanism (IBKEM) with anonymity. We illustrate two collision-free full-identity malleable IBKEM instances, which are semantically secure and anonymous, respectively, in the RO and standard models. The latter instance enables us to construct an SPCHS scheme with semantic security in the standard model