35,167 research outputs found
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
A Practical Searchable Symmetric Encryption Scheme for Smart Grid Data
Outsourcing data storage to the remote cloud can be an economical solution to
enhance data management in the smart grid ecosystem. To protect the privacy of
data, the utility company may choose to encrypt the data before uploading them
to the cloud. However, while encryption provides confidentiality to data, it
also sacrifices the data owners' ability to query a special segment in their
data. Searchable symmetric encryption is a technology that enables users to
store documents in ciphertext form while keeping the functionality to search
keywords in the documents. However, most state-of-the-art SSE algorithms are
only focusing on general document storage, which may become unsuitable for
smart grid applications. In this paper, we propose a simple, practical SSE
scheme that aims to protect the privacy of data generated in the smart grid.
Our scheme achieves high space complexity with small information disclosure
that was acceptable for practical smart grid application. We also implement a
prototype over the statistical data of advanced meter infrastructure to show
the effectiveness of our approach
Server-Aided Revocable Predicate Encryption: Formalization and Lattice-Based Instantiation
Efficient user revocation is a necessary but challenging problem in many
multi-user cryptosystems. Among known approaches, server-aided revocation
yields a promising solution, because it allows to outsource the major workloads
of system users to a computationally powerful third party, called the server,
whose only requirement is to carry out the computations correctly. Such a
revocation mechanism was considered in the settings of identity-based
encryption and attribute-based encryption by Qin et al. (ESORICS 2015) and Cui
et al. (ESORICS 2016), respectively.
In this work, we consider the server-aided revocation mechanism in the more
elaborate setting of predicate encryption (PE). The latter, introduced by Katz,
Sahai, and Waters (EUROCRYPT 2008), provides fine-grained and role-based access
to encrypted data and can be viewed as a generalization of identity-based and
attribute-based encryption. Our contribution is two-fold. First, we formalize
the model of server-aided revocable predicate encryption (SR-PE), with rigorous
definitions and security notions. Our model can be seen as a non-trivial
adaptation of Cui et al.'s work into the PE context. Second, we put forward a
lattice-based instantiation of SR-PE. The scheme employs the PE scheme of
Agrawal, Freeman and Vaikuntanathan (ASIACRYPT 2011) and the complete subtree
method of Naor, Naor, and Lotspiech (CRYPTO 2001) as the two main ingredients,
which work smoothly together thanks to a few additional techniques. Our scheme
is proven secure in the standard model (in a selective manner), based on the
hardness of the Learning With Errors (LWE) problem.Comment: 24 page
Using quantum key distribution for cryptographic purposes: a survey
The appealing feature of quantum key distribution (QKD), from a cryptographic
viewpoint, is the ability to prove the information-theoretic security (ITS) of
the established keys. As a key establishment primitive, QKD however does not
provide a standalone security service in its own: the secret keys established
by QKD are in general then used by a subsequent cryptographic applications for
which the requirements, the context of use and the security properties can
vary. It is therefore important, in the perspective of integrating QKD in
security infrastructures, to analyze how QKD can be combined with other
cryptographic primitives. The purpose of this survey article, which is mostly
centered on European research results, is to contribute to such an analysis. We
first review and compare the properties of the existing key establishment
techniques, QKD being one of them. We then study more specifically two generic
scenarios related to the practical use of QKD in cryptographic infrastructures:
1) using QKD as a key renewal technique for a symmetric cipher over a
point-to-point link; 2) using QKD in a network containing many users with the
objective of offering any-to-any key establishment service. We discuss the
constraints as well as the potential interest of using QKD in these contexts.
We finally give an overview of challenges relative to the development of QKD
technology that also constitute potential avenues for cryptographic research.Comment: Revised version of the SECOQC White Paper. Published in the special
issue on QKD of TCS, Theoretical Computer Science (2014), pp. 62-8
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