Paper 2016/501

Certificateless Key Insulated Encryption: Cryptographic Primitive for Achieving Key-escrow free and Key-exposure Resilience

Libo He, Chen Yuan, Hu Xiong, and Zhiguang Qin

Abstract

Certificateless encryption (CLE) alleviates the heavy certificate management in traditional public key encryption and the key escrow problem in the ID-based encryption simultaneously. Current CLE schemes assumed that the user’s secret key is absolutely secure. Unfortunately, this assumption is too strong in case the CLE is deployed in the hostile setting and the leakage of secret key is inevitable. In this paper, we present a new concept called an certificateless key insulated encryption scheme (CL-KIE). We argue that this is an important cryptographic primitive that can be used to achieve key-escrow free and key-exposure resilience. We also present an efficient CL-KIE scheme based on bilinear pairing. After that, the security of our scheme is proved under the Bilinear Diffie-Hellman assumption in the random oracle model. Certificateless encryption (CLE) alleviates the heavy certificate management in traditional public key encryption and the key escrow problem in the ID-based encryption simultaneously. Current CLE schemes assumed that the user’s secret key is absolutely secure. Unfortunately, this assumption is too strong in case the CLE is deployed in the hostile setting and the leakage of the secret key is inevitable. In this paper, we present a new concept called a certificateless key insulated encryption scheme (CL-KIE). We argue that this is an important cryptographic primitive that can be used to achieve key-escrow free and key-exposure resilience. We also present an efficient CL-KIE scheme based on bilinear pairing. After that, the security of our scheme is proved under the Bilinear DiffieHellman assumption in the random oracle model.