Paper 2025/365

Lattice-Based Updatable Public-Key Encryption for Group Messaging

Abstract

Updatable Public-Key Encryption (UPKE) augments the security of PKE with Forward Secrecy properties. While requiring more coordination between parties, UPKE enables much more efficient constructions than full-fledged Forward-Secret PKE. Alwen, Fuchsbauer and Mularczyk (AFM, Eurocrypt’24) presented the strongest security notion to date. It is the first to meet the needs of UPKE’s most important applications: Secure Group Messaging and Continuous Group Key Agreement. The authors provide a very efficient construction meeting their notion with classic security based on the Computational Diffie-Hellman (CDH) assumption in the Random Oracle Model (ROM). In this work we present the first post-quantum secure UPKE construction meeting (a slight relaxation of) the AFM security notion. Based on the Module LWE assumption, our construction is practically efficient. Moreover, public key sizes are about $$ and ciphertext sizes around $$ of those of the state-of-the-art lattice-based UPKE scheme in the ROM by Abou Haidar, Passelègue and Stehlé – despite only being shown to satisfy a significantly weaker security notion. As the AFM proofs relies on random self-reducibility of CDH, which has no analogue for lattices, we develop a new proof technique for strong UPKE, identifying the core properties required from the underlying (lattice-based) encryption scheme.