Simple CCA-secure public key encryption from any non-malleable identity-based encryption

Abstract

In this paper, we present a simple and generic method for constructing public key encryption (PKE) secure against chosen cipher-text attacks (CCA) from identity-based encryption (IBE). Specifically, we show that a CCA-secure PKE scheme can be generically obtained by encrypting (m||r) under identity "/(r)" with the encryption algorithm of the given IBE scheme, assuming that the IBE scheme is non-malleable and f is one-way. In contrast to the previous generic methods (such as Canetti-Halevi-Katz), our method requires stronger security for the underlying IBE schemes, non-malleability, and thus cannot be seen as a direct improvement of the previous methods. However, once we have an IBE scheme which is proved (or can be assumed) to be non-malleable, we will have a PKE scheme via our simple method, and we believe that the simpleness of our proposed transformation itself is theoretically interesting. Our proof technique for security of the proposed scheme is also novel. In the security proof, we show how to deal with certain types of decryption queries which cannot be handled by straightforwardly using conventional techniques. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2009.