Security-mediated certificateless cryptography

Abstract

We introduce the notion of security-mediated certificateless (SMC) cryptography. This allows more lightweight versions of mediated cryptography while maintaining the ability for instantaneous revocation of keys. Moreover, our solutions avoid key escrow, which has been used in all previous mediated cryptography algorithms. We provide a model of security against a fully-adaptive chosen ciphertext attacker, who may be a rogue key generation centre or any coalition of rogue users. We present a generic construction and also a concrete algorithm based on bilinear pairings. Our concrete scheme is more efficient than the identity-based mediated encryption scheme of Back and Zheng in PKC 2004 which is provably secure in a comparable security model. In addition, our proposals can be easily extended to support distributed security mediators. © International Association for Cryptologic Research 2006.