Dynamic threshold public-key encryption

Abstract

This paper deals with threshold public-key encryption which allows a pool of players to decrypt a ciphertext if a given threshold of authorized players cooperate. We generalize this primitive to the dynamic setting, where any user can dynamically join the system, as a possible recipient; the sender can dynamically choose the authorized set of recipients, for each ciphertext; and the sender can dynamically set the threshold t for decryption capability among the authorized set. We first give a formal security model, which includes strong robustness notions, and then we propose a candidate achieving all the above dynamic properties, that is semantically secure in the standard model, under a new non-interactive assumption, that fits into the general Diffie-Hellman exponent framework on groups with a bilinear map. It furthermore compares favorably with previous proposals, a.k.a. threshold broadcast encryption, since this is the first threshold public-key encryption, with dynamic authorized set of recipients and dynamic threshold that provides constant-size ciphertexts. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.