### Forward-Secure Hierarchical Predicate Encryption

Juan Manuel Gonzälez Nieto, Mark Manulis, and Dongdong Sun

##### Abstract

Secrecy of decryption keys is an important pre-requisite for security of any encryption scheme and compromised private keys must be immediately replaced. \emph{Forward Security (FS)}, introduced to Public Key Encryption (PKE) by Canetti, Halevi, and Katz (Eurocrypt 2003), reduces damage from compromised keys by guaranteeing confidentiality of messages that were encrypted prior to the compromise event. The FS property was also shown to be achievable in (Hierarchical) Identity-Based Encryption (HIBE) by Yao, Fazio, Dodis, and Lysyanskaya (ACM CCS 2004). Yet, for emerging encryption techniques, offering flexible access control to encrypted data, by means of functional relationships between ciphertexts and decryption keys, FS protection was not known to exist.\smallskip In this paper we introduce FS to the powerful setting of \emph{Hierarchical Predicate Encryption (HPE)}, proposed by Okamoto and Takashima (Asiacrypt 2009). Anticipated applications of FS-HPE schemes can be found in searchable encryption and in fully private communication. Considering the dependencies amongst the concepts, our FS-HPE scheme implies forward-secure flavors of Predicate Encryption and (Hierarchical) Attribute-Based Encryption.\smallskip Our FS-HPE scheme guarantees forward security for plaintexts and for attributes that are hidden in HPE ciphertexts. It further allows delegation of decrypting abilities at any point in time, independent of FS time evolution. It realizes zero-inner-product predicates and is proven adaptively secure under standard assumptions. As the cross-product" approach taken in FS-HIBE is not directly applicable to the HPE setting, our construction resorts to techniques that are specific to existing HPE schemes and extends them with what can be seen as a reminiscent of binary tree encryption from FS-PKE.

Note: Presented at Pairing 2012 on May 17, 2012.

Available format(s)
Category
Public-key cryptography
Publication info
Published elsewhere. Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Pairing-Based Cryptography (Pairing 2012).
Keywords
forward securitypredicate-based encryptionattribute-based encryption
Contact author(s)
j gonzaleznieto @ qut edu au
mark @ manulis eu
dd sun @ student qut edu au
History
Short URL
https://ia.cr/2012/402

CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2012/402,
author = {Juan Manuel Gonzälez Nieto and Mark Manulis and Dongdong Sun},
title = {Forward-Secure Hierarchical Predicate Encryption},
howpublished = {Cryptology ePrint Archive, Paper 2012/402},
year = {2012},
note = {\url{https://eprint.iacr.org/2012/402}},
url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2012/402}
}

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