Paper 2001/088

Improving the trade-off between storage and communication in broadcast encryption schemes

Ignacio Gracia, Sebastià Martín, and Carles Padró

Abstract

The most important point in the design of broadcast encryption schemes (BESs) is obtain a good trade-off between the amount of secret information that must be stored by every user and the length of the broadcast message, which are measured, respectively, by the information rate $\rho$ and the broadcast information rate $\rho_B$. In this paper we present a simple method to combine two given BESs in order to improve the trade-off between $\rho$ and $\rho_B$ by finding BESs with good information rate $\rho$ for arbitrarily many different values of the broadcast information rate $\rho_B$. We apply this technique to threshold $(R,T)$-BESs and we present a method to obtain, for every rational value $1/R \le \rho_B \le 1$, a $(R,T)$-BES with optimal information rate $\rho$ among all $(R,T)$-BESs that can be obtained by combining two of the $(R,T)$-BESs proposed by Blundo et al.