Decentralized dynamic broadcast encryption

Abstract

A broadcast encryption system generally involves three kinds of entities: the group manager that deals with the membership, the encryptor that encrypts the data to the registered users according to a specific policy (the target set), and the users that decrypt the data if they are authorized by the policy. Public-key broadcast encryption can be seen as removing this special role of encryptor, by allowing anybody to send encrypted data. In this paper, we go a step further in the decentralization process, by removing the group manager: the initial setup of the group, as well as the addition of further members to the system, do not require any central authority. Our construction makes black-box use of well-known primitives and can be considered as an extension to the subset-cover framework. It allows for efficient concrete instantiations, with parameter sizes that match those of the subset-cover constructions, while at the same time achieving the highest security level in the standard model under the DDH assumption. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.