Unconditionally secure revocable storage: Tight bounds, optimal construction, and robustness

Abstract

Data stored in cloud storage sometimes requires long-term security due to its sensitivity (e.g., genome data), and therefore, it also requires flexible access control for handling entities who can use the data. Broadcast encryption can partially provide such flexibility by specifying privileged receivers so that only they can decrypt a ciphertext. However, once privileged receivers are specified, they can be no longer dynamically added and/or removed. In this paper, we propose a new type of broadcast encryption which provides long-term security and appropriate access control, which we call unconditionally secure revocable-storage broadcast encryption (RS-BE). In RS-BE, privileged receivers of a ciphertext can be dynamically updated without revealing any information on the underlying plaintext. Specifically, we define a model and security of RS-BE, and derive tight lower bounds on sizes of secret keys required for a one-time secure RS-BE scheme when the ciphertext size is equal to the plaintext size. Our lower bounds can be applied to traditional broadcast encryption. We then construct a one-time secure RS-BE scheme with a trade-off between sizes of ciphertexts and secret keys, and our construction for the smallest ciphertext size meets all bounds with equalities. Furthermore, to detect an improper update, we consider security against modification attacks to a ciphertext, and present a concrete construction secure against this type of attacks.