Universally anonymizable public-key encryption

Abstract

We first propose the notion of universally anonymizable public-key encryption. Suppose that we have the encrypted data made with the same security parameter, and that these data do not satisfy the anonymity property. Consider the situation that we would like to transform these encrypted data to those with the anonymity property without decrypting these encrypted data. In this paper, in order to formalize this situation, we propose a new property for public-key encryption called universal anonymizability. If we use a universally anonymizable public-key encryption scheme, not only the person who made the ciphertexts, but also anyone can anonymize the encrypted data without using the corresponding secret key. We then propose universally anonymizable public-key encryption schemes based on the ElGamal encryption scheme, the Cramer-Shoup encryption scheme, and RSA-OAEP, and prove their security. © International Association for Cryptologic Research 2006.