Predicate encryption (PE), formalized by Katz et al., is a new paradigm of public-key encryption that conceptually captures the public-key encryption that supports fine-grained access control policy. Because of the nature of PE, it is used for cloud storage so that users can retrieve encrypted data without revealing any information about the data to cloud servers and other users. Although lots of PE schemes have been studied, the predicate-hiding security is seldom considered; that is, the user’s secret key may leak sensitive information of the predicate. Additionally, the security of the current predicate-hiding PE schemes relies on the discrete logarithm assumption which cannot resist the quantum attacks in the future. In this paper, we propose a generic PE for inner product under symmetric-key setting, called private IPE, from specific key-homomorphic pseudorandom function (PRF). The rigorous proofs are provided to show that the construction is payload-hiding, attribute-hiding, and predicate-hiding secure. With the advantage of the generic construction, if the underlying PRF can resist quantum attacks, then, through our proposed generic construction, a quantum-resistant private IPE can be obtained.
Predicate encryption (PE), formalized by Katz et al., is a new paradigm of public-key encryption that conceptually captures the public-key encryption that supports fine-grained access control policy. Because of the nature of PE, it is used for cloud storage so that users can retrieve encrypted data without revealing any information about the data to cloud servers and other users. Although lots of PE schemes have been studied, the predicate-hiding security is seldom considered; that is, the user’s secret key may leak sensitive information of the predicate. Additionally, the security of the current predicate-hiding PE schemes relies on the discrete logarithm assumption which cannot resist the quantum attacks in the future. In this paper, we propose a generic PE for inner product under symmetric-key setting, called private IPE, from specific key-homomorphic pseudorandom function (PRF). The rigorous proofs are provided to show that the construction is payload-hiding, attribute-hiding, and predicate-hiding secure. With the advantage of the generic construction, if the underlying PRF can resist quantum attacks, then, through our proposed generic construction, a quantum-resistant private IPE can be obtained.
This work furthers the exploration of meaningful definitions for security of Functional Encryption. We propose new simulation based definitions for function privacy in addition to data privacy and study their achievability. In addition, we improve efficiency/ underlying assumptions/ security achieved by existing inner product Functional Encryption and Property Preserving Encryption schemes, in both the private and public key setting. Our results can be summarized as follows: • We present a new simulation based definition, which we call Relax-AD-SIM, that lies between simulation based (SIM) and indistinguishability based (IND) definitions for data privacy, and implies the function privacy definition of [BRS13a]. Our definition relaxes the requirements on the simulator to bypass impossibility of SIM in the standard model. We show that the inner product FE scheme of [KSW08] enjoys Relax-AD-SIM security for function hiding and the inner product FE scheme of [LOS10] enjoys Relax-AD-SIM security for data hiding. • We study whether known impossibilities for achieving strong SIM based security imply actual real world attacks. For this, we present a new UC-style SIM based definition of security that captures both data and function hiding, both public key and symmetric key settings and represents the “dream” security of FE. While known impossibilities rule out its achievability in the standard model, we show, surprisingly, that it can be achieved in the generic group model for Inner Product FE ([KSW08]). This provides evidence that FE implementations may enjoy extremely strong security against a large class of real world attacks, namely generic attacks. It also implies a program obfuscator for the inner product functionality in the generic group model, which is related to the hyperplane-membership obfuscator of [CRV10]. • We provide several improvements to known constructions of Inner Product FE. In the private key setting, the construction by Shen et al. was based on non-standard assumptions, used composite order groups, and only achieved selective security. We give the first construction of a symmetric key inner product FE which is built using prime order groups, and is fully secure under the standard DLIN assumption. Our scheme is more efficient in the size of key and ciphertext than [SSW09], when the latter is converted to prime-order groups. We also port the public key inner product scheme of [KSW08] to prime order groups. • We give the first standard model construction of a property preserving encryption (PPE) scheme [PR12] for inner-products. Our scheme is secure under the DLIN assumption and satisfies the strongest definition of security – Left-or-Right security. Note that previously known constructions were only known to be secure in the generic group model. ∗UIUC. Email: sagrawl2@illinois.edu. †I.I.T, Delhi. Email: shweta.a@gmail.com. ‡UIUC. Email: bsaikrishna7393@gmail.com. §UCLA Email: abishekk@cs.ucla.edu. ¶UIUC. Email: manojmp@gmail.com. ‖UCLA Email: sahai@cs.ucla.edu.
Abstract Functional encryption (FE) is a novel paradigm for encryption scheme which allows tremendous flexibility in accessing encrypted information. In FE, a user can learn specific function of encrypted messages by restricted functional key and reveal nothing else about the messages. Inner product encryption (IPE) is a special type of functional encryption where the decryption algorithm, given a ciphertext related to a vector x and a secret key related to a vector y, computes the inner product x·y. In this paper, we construct an efficient private-key functional encryption (FE) for inner product with simulation-based security, which is much stronger than indistinguishability-based security, under the External Decisional Linear assumption in the standard model. Compared with the existing schemes, our construction is faster in encryption and decryption, and the master secret key, secret keys and ciphertexts are shorter.
Inner product functional encryption (IPFE) is a subclass of functional encryption (FE), whose function class is limited to inner product. We construct an efficient private-key IPFE scheme with full-hiding security, where confidentiality is assured for not only encrypted data but also functions associated with secret keys. Recently, Datta et al. presented such a scheme in PKC 2016 and this is the only scheme that achieves full-hiding security. Our scheme has an advantage over their scheme for the two aspects. More efficient: keys and ciphertexts of our scheme are almost half the size of those of their scheme. Weaker assumption: our scheme is secure under the k-linear (k-Lin) assumption, while their scheme is secure under a stronger assumption, namely, the symmetric external Diffie-Hellman (SXDH) assumption. It is well-known that the k-Lin assumption is equivalent to the SXDH assumption when k=1 and becomes weak as k increases.
The growing reliance on cloud computing has brought significant attention to the security and privacy of outsourced data. Subset Predicate Encryption (SPE) provides fine-grained access control suitable for cloud environments, enabling selective decryption based on predicate evaluation. However, most existing SPE constructions are vulnerable to quantum attacks and fail to address the critical issue of key leakage or user collusion. In this work, we present a lattice-based SPE scheme that is post-quantum secure and augmented with traitor tracing functionality. By integrating fingerprinting codes into the encryption and key generation processes, our design enables the identification of malicious users responsible for leaked decryption capabilities. Our scheme offers strong resistance against quantum adversaries and practical traceability in cloud-based data sharing scenarios.
Web-servers are a dominant medium of modern communication and thus process vast amounts of highly sensitive, private data. Social networks, online auctions, and all kinds of cloud services constitute popular examples of online services complying with this paradigm. Due to many alarming scandals regarding the misuse of private data, IT security solutions protecting this sensitive data (for example by hiding it through encryption) are indispensable. Ideally, web-servers should be able to compute on private data without seeing it - we refer to this as the "Secure Outsourcing of Computation". Most notably, the cryptographic primitive of Homomorphic Encryption (HE) enables the web-servers to process data in the encrypted domain, which thereby hides/protects all private data as it is never available in the clear. More precisely, HE is a type of encryption that allows for the computation of certain functionalities on encrypted data without knowledge of the decryption key. Depending on the HE scheme, various functionalities can be evaluated in the encrypted domain, ranging from additions or multiplications only (Group Homomorphic Encryption, GHE), to virtually any computable functionality (Fully Homomorphic Encryption, FHE). We provide a clean foundational framework for HE that permits security characterizations for a large class of HE schemes and shows strong similarities between GHE and FHE. We study these characterizations in order to assess the limits of HE, and show that GHE is obsolete in the quantum world, meaning that any GHE scheme can be broken by a quantum computer. Together with our newly constructed universal blueprint that encompasses virtually any GHE scheme, we know exactly how these schemes must be designed and what the underlying hardness assumptions must look like. To some extent, this rounds off the topic of GHE both in the standard and quantum model of computation. In the standard model (which is presently assumed to be the most realistic model of computation), GHE is still highly attractive as it provides very efficient solutions to a variety of practical problems. On the basis of our foundational framework, we construct new GHE schemes with unique features and show their employability in practical applications. Most importantly, we use the special features of one of these schemes and develop a novel technique to achieve a practically efficient solution to the problem of securely outsourcing computations. Our construction allows multiple users to send encryptions of their private data under their own keys to a distrusted web-server that can then, on behalf of the users, evaluate any dynamically chosen computable function on these inputs in the encrypted domain (even across encryptions under different public keys) without learning anything at all, and without interacting with the users.
We study multi-authority attribute-based functional encryption for noisy inner-product functionality, and propose two new primitives: (1) multi-authority attribute-based (noisy) inner-product functional encryption (MA-AB(N)IPFE), which generalizes existing multi-authority attribute-based IPFE schemes by Agrawal et al. (TCC'21), by enabling approximate inner-product computation; and (2) multi-authority attribute-based evasive inner-product functional encryption (MA-evIPFE), a relaxed variant inspired by the evasive IPFE framework by Hsieh et al. (EUROCRYPT'24), shifting focus from ciphertext indistinguishability to a more relaxed pseudorandomness-based security notion. To support the above notions, we introduce two variants of lattice-based computational assumptions: evasive IPFE assumption and indistinguishability-based evasive IPFE assumption (IND-evIPFE). We present lattice-based constructions of both primitives for subset policies, building upon the framework of Waters et al.( TCC'22). Our schemes are proven to be statically secure in the random oracle model under the standard LWE assumption and the newly introduced assumptions. Additionally, we show our MA-AB(N)IPFE scheme can be transformed via modulus switching into a noiseless MA-IPFE scheme that supports exact inner-product functionality. This yields the first lattice-based construction of such a primitive. All our schemes support arbitrary polynomial-size attribute policies and are secure in the random oracle model under lattice assumptions with a sub-exponential modulus-to-noise ratio, making them practical candidates for noise-tolerant, fine-grained access control in multi-authority settings.