Multiplex encryption: A practical approach to encrypting multi-recipient emails

Abstract

Efficiently protecting the privacy of multi-recipient emails is not as trivial as it seems. The approach proposed by S/MIME is to concatenate all ciphertexts. However, it suffers from poor scalability due to its linear computation and communication cost. In this paper, we propose a new practical and secure scheme, called multiplex encryption. By combining the ideas of identity-based mediated RSA and re-encryption mix network, our framework only requires constant computation and communication cost to encrypt a multi-recipient email. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.