Published in IET Information Security
Received on 18th September 2013
Revised on 29th July 2014
Accepted on 31st July 2014
doi: 10.1049/iet-ifs.2014.0145
ISSN 1751-8709
Efficient revocable certificateless encryption against
decryption key exposure
Yinxia Sun
1,2
, Futai Zhang
1,2
, Limin Shen
1,2
, Robert H. Deng
3
1
School of Computer Science and Technology, Nanjing Normal University, Nanjing 210023, People’s Republic of China
2
Jiangsu Engineering Research Center on Information Security and Privacy Protection Technology, Nanjing 210023,
People’s Republic of China
3
School of Information Systems, Singapore Management University, 80 Stamford Road, Singapore 178902, Singapore
E-mail: bela_suno@163.com
Abstract: Certificateless public key cryptosystem (CLPKC) improves the identity based public key cryptosystem to be key-
escrow free. Many research works on CLPKC have been presented so far. However, the revocation problem in CLPKC still
lacks effective solutions. The current revocation approaches suffer from either low efficiency or security weakness. In this
study, we propose the first ‘scalable revocable’ certificateless encryption (RCLE) scheme against ‘decryption key exposure’.
The scheme is provably secure in the standard model. Moreover, we give a second interesting RCLE scheme whose
decryption key is very short.
1 Introduction
In a public key cryptosystem, suppose Alice wants to send a
confidential message to Bob. She obtains Bob’s public key
certificate from the Certificate Authority, and checks the
validity of the certificate. If the certificate has not expired
and has not been revoked, Alice retrieves Bob’s public key
to encrypt the message. As is widely known, it is very
costly to perform certificate management. To overcome this
weakness, in 1984, Shamir proposed the famous
‘Identity-based Cryptography’ [1]. A user’s unique identity
is used as a public key. So there is no need to issue a public
key certificate to prove the authenticity. The according
private key is fully computed by a third party called Private
Key Generator (PKG). It is noteable that the PKG can
decrypt any ciphertext. In order to solve the inherent key
escrow problem in identity-based cryptosystem, in 2003,
Al-Riyami and Paterson introduced certificateless public key
cryptosystem (CLPKC) [2]. In this type of cryptosystem, a
user’s private key is just partially generated by a Key
Generation Centre (KGC). The user also selects a secret
value as the other part of the private key.
To a public key cryptosystem, how to achieve revocation
when a user’s private key is compromised or the contract
runs out, is an important and necessary problem. In the
conventional PKI, the revocation techniques are such as
certificate revocation lists, online certificate status protocol
[3] and Novomodo [4]. In the certificate-free public key
system, the revocation is in a different way from that of
PKI. In 2001, Boneh and Franklin [5] suggested that the
PKG computes users’ private keys in every time period.
PKG can revoke a user via stoping the generation of new
private keys for the user. Instantaneous revocation can be
obtained by employing a third party called SEM [6].
Boldyreva et al. [7] presented the first scalable ‘revocable
identity based encryption’ (RIBE) scheme, which was
improved by Libert and Vergnaud [8] to reach a strong
security level. In [9], Tsen g and Tsai claimed that
Boldyreva et al.’s scheme requires a secure channel to
do key updating, and presented the first revocable id entity
based encryption scheme with a public channel based on
the Boneh–Franklin scheme. However, Jae Hong SEO and
Keita EMURA pointed out the mistake of what Tseng- Tasi
claimed in their paper [9] that Boldyreva
et al.’s scheme
requires secure channels in the key update phase. So the
contribution of the first RIBE with a public channel [9]is
invalid. Moreover, the authors pointed out that it is simple
to remove secure channels from the Boneh–Franklin RIBE.
In contrast, there are less results on the revocation problem
of the certificateless cryptosystem. The mostly mentioned
SEcurity Mediator (SEM) [10–12] seems unpopular in
some application surroundings, since every user cannot do
decryption and signing independently. A natural approach
[10, 13] is to update users’ partial private keys regularly in
every time period. However, the need for secret channels to
transmit all partial private keys is very costly. In 2013,
Shen et al.[14] gave a solution to remove secret channels
for key-updating. However, their scheme suffers from
security weakness.
In PKC2013 [15], Seo et al. proposed the notion of
decryption key exposure (DKE) in the revocable identity
based setting. To resist DKE, a decryption key can be no
longer the simple combination of an initial private key and
an updated time key, but to add a new randomness to
compute the decryption key. However, this technique
inevitably introduces redundancy in a user’s decryption key
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The Institution of Engineering and Technology 2015
IET Inf. Secur., 2015, Vol. 9, Iss. 3, pp. 158–166
doi: 10.1049/iet-ifs.2014.0145