Cryptology ePrint Archive: Report 2006/304

Identity-Based Encryption Gone Wild

Michel Abdalla and Dario Catalano and Alexander W. Dent and John Malone-Lee and Gregory Neven and Nigel P. Smart

Abstract: In this paper we introduce a new primitive called identity-based encryption with wildcards, or WIBE for short. It allows to encrypt messages to a whole range of users simultaneously whose identities match a certain pattern. This pattern is defined through a sequence of fixed strings and wildcards, where any string can take the place of a wildcard in a matching identity. Our primitive can be applied to provide an intuitive way to send encrypted email to groups of users in a corporate hierarchy. We propose a full security notion and give efficient implementations meeting this notion under different pairing-related assumptions, both in the random oracle model and in the standard model.

Category / Keywords: public-key cryptography / Identity-based encryption, provable security

Publication Info: An extended abstract of this paper appeared in Michele Bugliesi, Bart Preneel, Vladimiro Sassone, and Ingo Wegener, editors, 33rd International Colloquium on Automata, Languages and Programming - ICALP 2006, volume 4052 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Springer-Verlag, 2006. This is the full version.

Date: received 5 Sep 2006, last revised 9 Dec 2006

Contact author: Gregory Neven at esat kuleuven be

Available formats: Postscript (PS) | Compressed Postscript (PS.GZ) | PDF | BibTeX Citation

Note: Version history: - July 2006: extended abstract at ICALP 2006 - Sept 2006: first full version on ePrint - Dec 2006: update to correct minor mistake in proof of Theorem 6.3

Version: 20061209:125948 (All versions of this report)

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