IACR News item: 29 December 2013
Xu An Wang, Yunlong Ge, Xiaoyuan Yang
ePrint Reportcan be decrypted by Bob, without the proxy knowing the corresponding plaintext. PRE has found many applications, such as in encrypted e-mail forwarding[8], distributed secure file systems[1,2], multicast[10] cloud computation etc. However, all the PRE schemes until now require the delegator (or the delegator and the delegatee cooperatively) to generate the re-encryption keys. We observe
that this is not the only way to generate the re-encryption keys, the encrypter also has the ability to generate re-encryption keys. Based on this observation, we introduce a new primitive: PRE^{+},
which is almost the same as the traditional PRE except the re-encryption keys generated by the encrypter. Interestingly, this PRE^{+} can be viewed as the dual of the traditional PRE. Compared
with PRE, PRE can easily achieve the non-transferable property and message-level based fine-grained delegation, while these two properties are very desirable in practical applications. We first
categorize PRE^{+} as the single-hop and multi-hop variant and discuss its potential applications, then we give the definition and security model for the single-hop PRE^{+}, construct a concrete scheme and
prove its security. Finally we conclude our paper with many interesting open problems.
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