Robust Encryption

Michel Abdalla; Mihir Bellare; Gregory Neven

Paper 2008/440

Robust Encryption

Michel Abdalla, Mihir Bellare, and Gregory Neven

Abstract

We provide a provable-security treatment of ``robust'' encryption. Robustness means it is hard to produce a ciphertext that is valid for two different users. Robustness makes explicit a property that has been implicitly assumed in the past. We argue that it is an essential conjunct of anonymous encryption. We show that natural anonymity-preserving ways to achieve it, such as adding recipient identification information before encrypting, fail. We provide transforms that do achieve it, efficiently and provably. We assess the robustness of specific encryption schemes in the literature, providing simple patches for some that lack the property. We discuss applications including PEKS (Public-key Encryption with Keyword Search) and auctions. Overall our work enables safer and simpler use of encryption.

Metadata

Available format(s): PDF
Publication info: A major revision of an IACR publication in TCC 2010
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-642-11799-2_28
Keywords: IBE public-key encryption searchable encryption auctions CCA security.
Contact author(s): michel abdalla @ ens fr
History: 2016-12-24: last of 5 revisions; 2008-10-20: received; See all versions
Short URL: https://ia.cr/2008/440
License: CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2008/440,
      author = {Michel Abdalla and Mihir Bellare and Gregory Neven},
      title = {Robust Encryption},
      howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2008/440},
      year = {2008},
      doi = {10.1007/978-3-642-11799-2_28},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2008/440}
}