Worry-free encryption: functional encryption with public keys

  • Authors:
  • Amit Sahai;Hakan Seyalioglu

  • Affiliations:
  • UCLA, Los Angeles, USA;UCLA, Los Angeles, USA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 17th ACM conference on Computer and communications security
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

In this work, we put forward the notion of Worry-Free Encryption. This allows Alice to encrypt confidential information under Bob's public key and send it to him, without having to worry about whether Bob has the authority to actually access this information. This is done by encrypting the message under a hidden access policy that only allows Bob to decrypt if his credentials satisfy the policy. Our notion can be seen as a functional encryption scheme but in a public-key setting. As such, we are able to insist that even if the credential authority is corrupted, it should not be able to compromise the security of any honest user. We put forward the notion of Worry-Free Encryption and show how to achieve it for any polynomial-time computable policy, under only the assumption that IND-CPA public-key encryption schemes exist. Furthermore, we construct CCA-secure Worry-Free Encryption, efficiently in the random oracle model, and generally (but inefficiently) using simulation-sound non-interactive zero-knowledge proofs.