Paper 2012/664

PRE- Stronger Security Notion and Efficient Construction with New Property

Jiang Zhang, Zhenfeng Zhang, and Yu Chen

Abstract

In a proxy re-encryption (PRE) scheme, a proxy is given a re-encryption key and has the ability to translate a ciphertext under one key into a ciphertext of the same message under a different key, without learning anything about the message encrypted under either key. PREs have been widely used in many exciting applications, such as email forwarding and law enforcement. Based on a good observation on the applications of PREs, we find that a PRE receiver needs an ability, just like what is provided by public-key encryption with non-interactive opening, to non-interactively and efficiently convince third parties of what he obtains from a particular (transformed) ciphertext, while still keeping the security of his secret key and other ciphertexts. To meet such a practical requirement, we first introduce proxy re-encryption with non-interactive opening (PRENO), and formally define the notions of security against \textit{chosen ciphertext attacks} (CCA) and \textit{proof soundness}. Our security model is natural and strong since we allow the CCA adversary to adaptively choose public keys for malicious users (i.e., a chosen key model), and a scheme secure in previous models (i.e., knowledge of secret key models) is not necessarily secure in our model. Then, we present an efficient PRENO scheme which satisfies our security notions based on the decisional bilinear Diffie-Hellman (DBDH) assumption in the standard model. Compared with two previous PRE schemes, our scheme is competitive in several aspects. First, its CCA security is proved in a strong security model under a well-studied assumption in the standard model. Second, it has a good overall performance in terms of ciphertext length and computational cost. Third, it first provides non-interactive opening for PRE schemes.