Privacy-Preserving Electronic Ticket Scheme with Attribute-based Credentials

Electronic tickets (e-tickets) are electronic versions of paper tickets, which enable users to access intended services and improve services' efficiency. However, privacy may be a concern of e-ticket users. In this paper, a privacy-preserving electronic ticket scheme with attribute-based credentials is proposed to protect users' privacy and facilitate ticketing based on a user's attributes. Our proposed scheme makes the following contributions: (1) users can buy different tickets from ticket sellers without releasing their exact attributes; (2) two tickets of the same user cannot be linked; (3) a ticket cannot be transferred to another user; (4) a ticket cannot be double spent; (5) the security of the proposed scheme is formally proven and reduced to well known (q-strong Diffie-Hellman) complexity assumption; (6) the scheme has been implemented and its performance empirically evaluated. To the best of our knowledge, our privacy-preserving attribute-based e-ticket scheme is the first one providing these five features. Application areas of our scheme include event or transport tickets where users must convince ticket sellers that their attributes (e.g. age, profession, location) satisfy the ticket price policies to buy discounted tickets. More generally, our scheme can be used in any system where access to services is only dependent on a user's attributes (or entitlements) but not their identities.Comment: 18pages, 6 figures, 2 table

Receiver and Sender Deniable Functional Encryption

Deniable encryption, first introduced by Canetti et al. (CRYPTO 1997), allows equivocation of encrypted communication. In this work we generalize its study to functional encryption (FE). Our results are summarized as follows: We first put forward and motivate the concept of receiver deniable FE, for which we consider two models. In the first model, as previously considered by O'Neill et al. (CRYPTO 2011) in the case of identity-based encryption, a receiver gets assistance from the master authority to generate a fake secret key. In the second model, there are ``normal'' and ``deniable'' secret keys, and a receiver in possession of a deniable secret key can produce a fake but authentic-looking normal key on its own. In the first model, we show a compiler from any FE scheme for the general circuit functionality to a FE scheme having receiver deniability. In addition we show an efficient receiver deniable FE scheme for Boolean Formulae from bilinear maps. In the second (multi-distributional) model, we present a specific FE scheme for the general circuit functionality having receiver deniability. To our knowledge, a scheme in the multi-distributional model was not previously known even for the special case of identity-based encryption. Finally, we construct the first sender (non-multi-distributional) deniable FE scheme

Controlled Homomorphic Encryption: Definition and Construction

Abstract. Fully Homomorphic Encryption schemes (FHEs) and Functional Encryption schemes (FunctEs) have a tremendous impact in cryptography both for the natural questions that they address and for the wide range of applications in which they have been (sometimes critically) used. In this work we put forth the notion of a Controllable Homomorphic Encryption scheme (CHES), a new primitive that includes features of both FHEs and FunctEs. In a CHES it is possible (similarly to a FHE) to homomorphically evaluate a ciphertext Ct = Enc(m) and a circuit C therefore obtaining Enc(C(m)) but only if (similarly to a FunctE) a token for C has been received from the owner of the secret key. We discuss difficulties in constructing a CHES and then show a construction based on any FunctE. As a byproduct our CHES also represents a FunctE supporting the reencryption functionality and in that respect improves existing solutions

On the power of rewinding simulators in functional encryption

In a seminal work, Boneh, Sahai and Waters (BSW) [TCC'11] showed that for functional encryption the indistinguishability notion of security (IND-Security) is weaker than simulation-based security (SIM-Security), and that SIM-Security is in general impossible to achieve. This has opened up the door to a plethora of papers showing feasibility and new impossibility results. Nevertheless, the quest for better definitions that (1) overcome the limitations of IND-Security and (2) the known impossibility results, is still open. In this work, we explore the benefits and the limits of using efficient rewinding black-box simulators to argue security. To do so, we introduce a new simulation-based security definition, that we call rewinding simulation-based security (RSIM-Security), that is weaker than the previous ones but it is still sufficiently strong to not meet pathological schemes as it is the case for IND-Security (that is implied by the RSIM). This is achieved by retaining a strong simulation-based flavour but adding more rewinding power to the simulator having care to guarantee that it can not learn more than what the adversary would learn in any run of the experiment. What we found is that for RSIM the BSW impossibility result does not hold and that IND-Security is equivalent to RSIM-Security for attribute-based encryption in the standard model. Nevertheless, we prove that there is a setting where rewinding simulators are of no help. The adversary can put in place a strategy that forces the simulator to rewind continuously