Cryptology ePrint Archive: Report 2018/1176

Downgradable Identity-based Encryption and Applications

Olivier Blazy and Paul Germouty and Duong Hieu Phan

Abstract: In Identity-based cryptography, in order to generalize one receiver encryption to multi-receiver encryption, wildcards were introduced: WIBE enables wildcard in receivers' pattern and Wicked-IBE allows one to generate a key for identities with wildcard. However, the use of wildcard makes the construction of WIBE, Wicked-IBE more complicated and significantly less efficient than the underlying IBE. The main reason is that the conventional identity's binary alphabet is extended to a ternary alphabet $\{0,1,*\}$ and the wildcard $*$ is always treated in a convoluted way in encryption or in key generation. In this paper, we show that when dealing with multi-receiver setting, wildcard is not necessary. We introduce a new downgradable property for IBE scheme and show that any IBE with this property, called DIBE, can be efficiently transformed into WIBE or Wicked-IBE.

While WIBE and Wicked-IBE have been used to construct Broadcast encryption, we go a step further by employing DIBE to construct Attribute-based Encryption of which the access policy is expressed as a boolean formula in the disjunctive normal form.

Category / Keywords: cryptographic protocols / Identity-Based Encryption, Attribute-Based Encryption

Original Publication (with minor differences): CT-RSA 2019

Date: received 1 Dec 2018

Contact author: olivier blazy at unilim fr

Available format(s): PDF | BibTeX Citation

Version: 20181203:032827 (All versions of this report)

Short URL: ia.cr/2018/1176