On Constructing Certificateless Cryptosystems from Identity Based Encryption

Certificateless public key cryptography (CL-PKC) can solve the problems of certificate management in a public key infrastructure (PKI) and of key escrows in identity-based public key cryptography (ID-PKC). In CL-PKC, the key generation center (KGC) does not know the private keys of all users, and their public keys need not be certificated by certification authority (CA). At present, however, most certificateless encryption schemes are based on large integer factorization and discrete logarithms that are not secure in a quantum environment and the computation complexity is high. To solve these problems, we propose a new certificate-less encryption scheme based on lattices, more precisely, using the hardness of the learning with errors (LWE) problem. Compared with schemes based on large integer factorization and discrete logarithms, the most operations are matrixvector multiplication and inner products in our scheme, our approach has lower computation complexity. Our scheme can be proven to be indistinguishability chosen ciphertext attacks (IND-CPA) secure in the random oracle model.

The concept of policy-based cryptography is a promising paradigm for trust establishment and authorization in largescale open environments like the Internet and Mobile Networks. It aims at providing a framework for performing cryptographic operations with respect to policies formalized as monotone Boolean expressions written in standard normal forms. A policy involves conjunctions and disjunctions of conditions where each condition is fulfilled by a digital credential representing the signature of a specific credential issuer on a set of statements about a certain entity. Therefore, an entity fulfills a policy if any only if it has been issued a set of credentials fulfilling the combination of conditions specified by the policy.In this work, we focus on policy-based encryption schemes which allow to encrypt a message according to a policy so that only entities fulfilling the policy are able to decrypt the message. More generally, policy-based encryption belongs to an emerging family of encryption schemes sharing the ability to integrate encryption with access control structures. This ability is mainly enabled by bilinear pairings over elliptic curves and allows for several interesting applications in different contexts.A policy-based encryption scheme has to fulfill two primary requirements: on one hand, provable security under well defined attack models. On the other hand, efficiency, especially when dealing with the conjunctions and disjunctions of credential-based conditions.The contributions of our research work are twofold:1. The standard acceptable notion of security for public-key encryption schemes is indistinguishability against chosen ciphertext attacks. Hence, it is natural to require that a policy-based encryption scheme also satisfies this strong notion of security. However, the definition of this security notion must be adapted to the policy-based setting. Our first contribution is the definition of policy-oriented security model for policy-based encryption schemes as well as the development of an efficient policy-based encryption scheme that is provably secure under our security model in the random oracle model.2. Policy-based encryption schemes may suffer from the key-escrow property i.e. in addition to the legitimate holder of the credentials fulfilling the encryption policy, any collusion of credential issuers who are able to issue a set of credentials fulfilling the policy can decrypt the message. Our second contribution is to address this issue through the notion of policy-based public-key encryption. The latter allows encrypting a message not only with respect to a policy but also according to a public-key so that only an entity fulfilling the policy and having access to the corresponding private-key is able to decrypt the message. We developed a policy-based public-key encryption scheme from bilinear pairings and proved its security under the corresponding security model. Our proposal improves related work in terms of both security and efficiency.

In recent years, secure communication and privacy‐preserving are gaining popularity because of the advent of wireless network. Certificateless cryptography (CLC) and identity‐based cryptography (IBC) have already been widely applied in the area of wireless network. Hence, to achieve secure communication from CLC to IBC, we present a heterogeneous signcryption scheme that enables a sender in the CLC to transmit a message to multi‐receiver in the IBC. Our scheme has no restrictions on the system parameters and master keys; private key generator and key generating center generate their own system parameters and master key for the IBC users and the CLC user, separately. Considering privacy‐preserving in heterogeneous communication, we show that our scheme can realize the anonymity of all receivers. Compared with other schemes, our scheme has more advantages, such as public verification and decryption fairness, which are attractive for wireless network applications. Moreover, our scheme has the indistinguishability against adaptive chosen ciphertext attacks, the existential unforgeability against adaptive chosen messages attacks, and anonymous indistinguishability of encryptions under selective‐ID, chosen ciphertext attack in the random oracle model. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Searchable public key encryption enables a storage server to retrieve the publicly encrypted data without revealing the original data contents. It offers a perfect cryptographic solution to encrypted data retrieval in encrypted data storage systems. Certificateless cryptography (CLC) is a novel cryptographic primitive that has many merits. It overcomes the key escrow problem in identity-based cryptosystems and the cumbersome certificate problem in conventional public key cryptosystems. Motivated by the appealing features of CLC, three certificateless encryption with keyword search (CLEKS) schemes were presented in the literature. However, all of them were constructed with the costly bilinear pairing and thus are not suitable for the devices that have limited computing resources and battery power. So, it is interesting and worthwhile to design a CLEKS scheme without using bilinear pairing. In this study, we put forward a pairing-free CLEKS scheme that does not exploit bilinear pairing. We strictly prove that the scheme achieves keyword ciphertext indistinguishability against adaptive chosen-keyword attacks under the complexity assumption of the computational Diffie-Hellman problem in the random oracle model. Efficiency comparison and the simulation show that it enjoys better performance than the previous pairing-based CLEKS schemes. In addition, we briefly introduce three extensions of the proposed CLEKS scheme.

The notion of certificateless cryptography is aimed to eliminate the use of certificates in traditional public key cryptography and also to solve the key-escrow problem in identity-based cryptography. Many kinds of security models have been designed for certificateless cryptography and many new schemes have been introduced based on the correspondence of the security models. In generally speaking, a stronger security model can ensure a certificateless cryptosystem with a higher security level, but a realistic model can lead to a more efficient scheme. In this paper, we focus on the efficiency of a certificateless signature (CLS) scheme and introduce an efficient CLS scheme with short signature size. On one hand, the security of the scheme is based on a realistic model. In this model, an adversary is not allowed to get any valid signature under false public keys. On the other hand, our scheme is as efficient as BLS short signature scheme in both communication and computation and, therefore, turns out to be more efficient than other CLS schemes proposed so far. We provide a rigorous security proof of our scheme in the random oracle model. The security of our scheme is based on the k-CAA hard problem and a new discovered hard problem, namely the modified k-CAA problem. Our scheme can be applied to systems where signatures are typed in by human or systems with low-bandwidth channels and/or low-computation power.

Secure distribution of digital goods is now a significantly important issue for protecting publishers' copyrights. In this paper, we study a useful primitive for constructing a secure and efficient digital rights management system (DRM) where a server which encrypts digital content and one which issues the corresponding decryption key works independently, and existing schemes lack this property. We first argue the desired property necessary of an encryption scheme for constructing an efficient DRM, and formally define an encryption scheme as split encryption scheme containing such property. Also, we show that an efficient split encryption scheme can be constructed from any identity-based scheme. However, since currently there is no identity-based encryption scheme which is based on well-known computational assumption and/or provable security without the random oracle, by reasonably tuning the system parameter, we show another construction of split encryption which is secure against chosen ciphertext attacks in the standard model assuming that the decision Diffie-Hellman problem is hard to solve.

Featuring no key escrow and no certificate, certificateless public key cryptography (CLPKC) has received much attention. A necessary problem in CLPKC is how to revoke a compromised/misbehaving user, which still remains to be efficiently solved: all existing methods are not practical for use owing to either enormous computation (secret channels), or a costly mediator. In this paper, we present a new approach for revocation in CLPKC and give a revocable certificateless encryption (RCLE) scheme. In the new scheme, a user's private key contains three parts: an initial partial private key, a time key and a secret value. The time key is updated at every time period and is transmitted over a public channel. Our construction offers higher performance than previous solutions. Based on the bilinear Diffie-Hellman problem, our RCLE scheme is provably secure in the random oracle model.

In this paper, we formally prove that padding the plaintext with a random bit-string provides the semantic security against chosen plaintext attack (IND-CPA) for the McEliece (and its dual, the Niederreiter) cryptosystems under the standard assumptions. Such padding has recently been used by Suzuki, Kobara and Imai in the context of RFID security. Our proof relies on the technical result by Katz and Shin from Eurocrypt '05 showing "pseudorandomness" implied by the learning parity with noise (LPN) problem. We do not need the random oracles as opposed to the known generic constructions which, on the other hand, provide a stronger protection as compared to our scheme--against (adaptive) chosen ciphertext attack, i.e., IND-CCA(2). In order to show that the padded version of the cryptosystem remains practical, we provide some estimates for suitable key sizes together with corresponding workload required for successful attack.

Signcryption is a cryptographic technique that provides both confidentiality and authenticity of data during public transmission in many modern applications like Internet -of -Things (IoT), Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) etc. The functionalities of encryption and Signature can achieve simultaneously through the signcryption with lower computational cost and communication overheads than those of traditional sign-then-encrypt approach. Many signcryption schemes have been constructed by various researchers in different cryptographic frameworks. Certificateless cryptography is one of the recent public key cryptography which eliminates the key escrow problem and complex certificate management problemsin identity based cryptography and traditional public key cryptography respectively. Providing the security and efficiency in many modern applications including IoT and WSNs is a crucial task. In this paper, we proposed new signcryption scheme in certificateless cryptography. This scheme supports the property of public verifiability and is secure against various types of adversaries in the random oracle model with the assumption that the Computational Diffie-Hellman Problem (CDHP) and the Elliptic Curve Discrete Logarithmic Problems (ECDLP) are hard. Due to pairing-free environment the proposed scheme is computationally more efficient than the existing public verifiable signcryption schemes.

Certificate-based encryption (CBE) combines traditional public-key encryption and certificateless encryption. However, it does suffer to the Denial of Decryption (DoD) attack called by Liu and Au. To capture this attack, they introduced a new paradigm called self-generated-certificate public key cryptography. In this paper we show that the problem of DoD attack can be solved with a new implicit and explicit certificates-based public key cryptography paradigm. More importantly, we propose a concrete implicit and explicit certificate-based encryption (IE-CBE) scheme that defends against DoD attack. This new scheme is enhanced version of CBE scheme and preserves all its advantages, i.e., every user is given by the trusted authority an implicit certificate as a part of a private key and generates his own secret key and corresponding public key. In addition, in the IE-CBE scheme trusted authority has to generate an explicit certificate for a user with some identity and a public key. We prove that our scheme is IND-CCA2− and DoD-Free secure in the random oracle model as hard is to solve p-BDHI and k-CCA problems.

Blind signatures allow a signer to issue signatures on messages chosen by the signature recipient. The main property is that the recipient’s message is hidden from the signer. There are many applications, including Chaum’s e-cash system and Privacy Pass, where no special distribution of the signed message is required, and the message can be random. Interestingly, existing notions do not consider this practical use case separately. In this paper, we show that constraining the recipient’s choice over the message distribution spawns a surprising new primitive that improves the well-established state-of-the-art. We formalize this concept by introducing the notion of non-interactive blind signatures ( $$\textsf{NIBS}$$ ). Informally, the signer can create a presignature with a specific recipient in mind, identifiable via a public key. The recipient can use her secret key to finalize it and receive a blind signature on a random message determined by the finalization process. The key idea is that online interaction between the signer and recipient is unnecessary. We show an efficient instantiation of $$\textsf{NIBS}$$ in the random oracle model from signatures on equivalence classes. The exciting part is that, in this case, for the recipient’s public key, we can use preexisting keys for Schnorr, ECDSA signatures, El-Gamal encryption scheme or even the Diffie-Hellman key exchange. Reusing preexisting public keys allows us to distribute anonymous tokens similarly to cryptocurrency airdropping. Additional contributions include tagged non-interactive blind signatures ( $$\textsf{TNIBS}$$ ) and their efficient instantiation. A generic construction in the random oracle or common reference string model based on verifiable random functions, standard signatures, and non-interactive proof systems.

Semantic security against chosen-ciphertext attacks (INDCCA) is widely believed as the correct security level for public-key encryption scheme. On the other hand, it is often dangerous to give to only one people the power of decryption. Therefore, threshold cryptosystems aimed at distributing the decryption ability. However, only two efficient such schemes have been proposed so far for achieving IND-CCA. Both are El Gamal-like schemes and thus are based on the same intractability assumption, namely the Decisional Diffie-Hellman problem. In this article we rehabilitate the twin-encryption paradigm proposed by Naor and Yung to present generic conversions from a large family of (threshold) IND-CPA scheme into a (threshold) IND-CCA one in the random oracle model. An efficient instantiation is also proposed, which is based on the Paillier cryptosystem. This new construction provides the first example of threshold cryptosystem secure against chosen-ciphertext attacks based on the factorization problem. Moreover, this construction provides a scheme where the properties of the original scheme still hold. This is rather cumbersome because homomorphic cryptosystems are known to be malleable and therefore not to be CCA secure. However, we do not build a cryptosystem, but just keep the homomorphic properties.

Threshold Public Key Encryption allows a set of servers to decrypt a cipher text if a given threshold of authorized servers cooperate. Forward security allows one to mitigate the damage caused by exposure of secret keys. Forward-secure public encryptions are used to the threshold setting, this model guarantees that even if an adversary have broken into more than t distinct servers(for some i), messages encrypted during all time periods prior to i remain secret. In this paper, we present the first probably secure (non-interactive) forward-secure threshold public-key encryption scheme against chosen-cipher text attacks in the random oracle model. The encryption and update operations are very efficient when compared with the scheme presented by Libert et al. A formal definition, as well as a detailed analysis of the security performance of this scheme, is presented. The security of this scheme is based on the Computational Bilinear Diffie Hellman assumption, which leads to a unique approach to prove security in the random oracle model. Furthermore, in our model, the servers update their keys individually and asynchronously, without any communication between them.

We define new algorithmic problems and discuss their properties (in particular, we present a careful study of their computational complexity). We apply the new problems to design public key encryption protocols with semantic security relative to their decisional variants. We then show how to provide efficient schemes that are semantically secure under adaptive chosen ciphertext attacks in the random oracle model. Finally, we show that the ideas developed in this extended abstract can be used to design the most efficient known cryptosystem with semantic security under non-adaptive chosen ciphertext attacks in the standard security model.

Outsourcing private data and heavy computation tasks to the cloud may lead to privacy breach as attackers (e.g., malicious outsiders or cloud administrators) may correlate any relevant information to penetrate information of their interests. Therefore, how to preserve cloud users' privacy has been a top concern when adopting cloud solutions. In this paper, we investigate the identity privacy problem for the proxy re-encryption, which allows any third party (e.g., cloud) to re-encrypt ciphertexts in order to delegate the decryption right from one to another user. The relevant identity information, e.g., whose ciphertext was re-encrypted to the ciphertext under whose public key, may leak because re-encryption keys and ciphertexts (before and after re-encryption) are known to the third party. We review prior anonymity (identity privacy) notions, and find that these notions are either impractical or too weak. To address this problem thoroughly, we rigorously define the anonymity notion that not only embraces the prior anonymity notions but also captures the necessary anonymity requirement for practical applications. In addition, we propose a new and efficient proxy re-encryption scheme. The scheme satisfies the proposed anonymity notion under the Squared Decisional Bilinear Diffie-Hellman assumption and achieves security against chosen ciphertext attack under the Decisional Bilinear Diffie-Hellman assumption in the random oracle model. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first proxy re-encryption scheme attaining both chosen-ciphertext security and anonymity simultaneously.We implement a prototype based on the proposed proxy re-encryption scheme and the performance study shows that it is efficient.