International Association
for Cryptologic Research

Identity-based non-interactive key exchange (IB-NIKE) is a powerful but a bit overlooked primitive in identity-based cryptography. While identity-based encryption and signature have been extensively investigated over the past three decades, IB-NIKE has remained largely unstudied. Currently, there are only few IB-NIKE schemes in the literature. Among them, Sakai-Ohgishi-Kasahara (SOK) scheme is the first efficient and secure IB-NIKE scheme, which has great influence on follow-up works. However, the SOK scheme required its identity mapping function to be modeled as a random oracle to prove security. Moreover, the existing security proof heavily relies on the ability of programming the random oracle. It is unknown whether such reliance is inherent.

In this work, we intensively revisit the SOK IB-NIKE scheme, and present a series of possible and impossible results in the random oracle model and the standard model. In the random oracle model, we first improve previous security analysis for the SOK IB-NIKE scheme by giving a tighter reduction. We then use meta-reduction technique to show that the SOK scheme is unlikely proven to be secure based on the computational bilinear Diffie-Hellman (CBDH) assumption without programming the random oracle. In the standard model, we show how to instantiate the random oracle in the SOK scheme with a concrete hash function from admissible hash functions (AHFs) and indistinguishability obfuscation.

The resulting scheme is fully adaptive-secure based on the decisional bilinear Diffie-Hellman inversion (DBDHI) assumption. To the best of our knowledge, this is first fully adaptive-secure IB-NIKE scheme in the standard model that does not explicitly require multilinear maps. Previous schemes in the standard model either have merely selective security or use multilinear maps as a key ingredient. Of particular interest, we generalize the definition of AHFs, and propose a generic construction which enables AHFs with previously unachieved parameters.