Towards Black-Box Accountable Authority IBE with Short Ciphertexts and Private Keys


Abstract in English

At Crypto07, Goyal introduced the concept of Accountable Authority Identity-Based Encryption as a convenient tool to reduce the amount of trust in authorities in Identity-Based Encryption. In this model, if the Private Key Generator (PKG) maliciously re-distributes users decryption keys, it runs the risk of being caught and prosecuted. Goyal proposed two constructions: the first one is efficient but can only trace well-formed decryption keys to their source; the second one allows tracing obfuscated decryption boxes in a model (called weak black-box model) where cheating authorities have no decryption oracle. The latter scheme is unfortunately far less efficient in terms of decryption cost and ciphertext size. In this work, we propose a new construction that combines the efficiency of Goyals first proposal with a very simple weak black-box tracing mechanism. Our scheme is described in the selective-ID model but readily extends to meet all security properties in the adaptive-ID sense, which is not known to be true for prior black-box schemes.

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