Forward-secure hierarchical predicate encryption

Secrecy of decryption keys is an important pre-requisite for security of any encryption scheme and compromised private keys must be immediately replaced. \emph{Forward Security (FS)}, introduced to Public Key Encryption (PKE) by Canetti, Halevi, and Katz (Eurocrypt 2003), reduces damage from compromised keys by guaranteeing confidentiality of messages that were encrypted prior to the compromise event. The FS property was also shown to be achievable in (Hierarchical) Identity-Based Encryption (HIBE) by Yao, Fazio, Dodis, and Lysyanskaya (ACM CCS 2004). Yet, for emerging encryption techniques, offering flexible access control to encrypted data, by means of functional relationships between ciphertexts and decryption keys, FS protection was not known to exist.\smallskip In this paper we introduce FS to the powerful setting of \emph{Hierarchical Predicate Encryption (HPE)}, proposed by Okamoto and Takashima (Asiacrypt 2009). Anticipated applications of FS-HPE schemes can be found in searchable encryption and in fully private communication. Considering the dependencies amongst the concepts, our FS-HPE scheme implies forward-secure flavors of Predicate Encryption and (Hierarchical) Attribute-Based Encryption.\smallskip Our FS-HPE scheme guarantees forward security for plaintexts and for attributes that are hidden in HPE ciphertexts. It further allows delegation of decrypting abilities at any point in time, independent of FS time evolution. It realizes zero-inner-product predicates and is proven adaptively secure under standard assumptions. As the ``cross-product" approach taken in FS-HIBE is not directly applicable to the HPE setting, our construction resorts to techniques that are specific to existing HPE schemes and extends them with what can be seen as a reminiscent of binary tree encryption from FS-PKE

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

Fully Secure Spatial Encryption under Simple Assumptions with Constant-Size Ciphertexts

In this paper, we propose two new spatial encryption (SE) schemes based on existing inner product encryption (IPE) schemes. Both of our SE schemes are fully secure under simple assumptions and in prime order bilinear groups. Moreover, one of our SE schemes has constant-size ciphertexts. Since SE implies hierarchical identity-based encryption (HIBE), we also obtain a fully secure HIBE scheme with constant-size ciphertexts under simple assumptions. Our second SE scheme is attribute-hiding (or anonymous). It has sizes of public parameters, secret keys and ciphertexts that are quadratically smaller than the currently known SE scheme with similar properties. As a side result, we show that negated SE is equivalent to non-zero IPE. This is somewhat interesting since the latter is known to be a special case of the former

Hierarchical Functional Encryption

Functional encryption provides fine-grained access control for encrypted data, allowing each user to learn only specific functions of the encrypted data. We study the notion of hierarchical functional encryption, which augments functional encryption with delegation capabilities, offering significantly more expressive access control. We present a generic transformation that converts any general-purpose public-key functional encryption scheme into a hierarchical one without relying on any additional assumptions. This significantly refines our understanding of the power of functional encryption, showing that the existence of functional encryption is equivalent to that of its hierarchical generalization. Instantiating our transformation with the existing functional encryption schemes yields a variety of hierarchical schemes offering various trade-offs between their delegation capabilities (i.e., the depth and width of their hierarchical structures) and underlying assumptions. When starting with a scheme secure against an unbounded number of collusions, we can support arbitrary hierarchical structures. In addition, even when starting with schemes that are secure against a bounded number of collusions (which are known to exist under rather minimal assumptions such as the existence of public-key encryption and shallow pseudorandom generators), we can support hierarchical structures of bounded depth and width

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)

On the Anonymity of Identity-Based Encryption

Anonymity of identity-based encryption (IBE) means that given a ciphertext, one cannot distinguish the target identity from a random identity. In this paper, we thoroughly discuss the anonymity of IBE systems. We found that the current definition of anonymity is obscure to describe some IBE systems, such as Gentry IBE system. Furthermore, current definition cannot express the degree of anonymity. So we divide the degree of anonymity into weak anonymity and strong anonymity based on indistinguishability between different games. For weakly anonymous IBE systems, the target identity in a ciphertext cannot be distinguished from a random identity. For strongly anonymous IBE systems, the whole ciphertext cannot be distinguished from a random tuple. We also discuss the type of anonymity and divide it into two types. Type 1 means that a random tuple can be seen as a valid ciphertext, while type 2 cannot. Based on our new definitions, we show that three famous IBE systems, Gentry IBE system, Boyen-Waters IBE system, and Lewko IBE system, have strong but different types of anonymity