International Association for Cryptologic Research

International Association
for Cryptologic Research

IACR News item: 21 August 2015

Akshayaram Srinivasan, C. Pandu Rangan
ePrint Report ePrint Report
A re-encryption program (or a circuit) converts a ciphertext encrypted under Alice\'s public key pk_1 to a ciphertext of the same message encrypted under Bob\'s public key pk_2. Hohenberger et al. (TCC 2007) constructed a pairing-based obfuscator for a family of circuits implementing the re-encryption functionality under a new notion of obfuscation called as average-case secure obfuscation. Chandran et al. (PKC 2014) proposed a lattice-based construction for the same.

The construction given by Hohenberger et al. could only support encryptions of messages from a polynomial space and the decryption algorithm would have to perform a polynomial number of pairing operations in the worst case. The construction given by Chandran et al. satisfies only a relaxed notion of correctness.

In this work, we propose a simple and efficient obfuscator for the re-encryption functionality which not only supports encryption of messages from an exponential space but also involves only a constant number of group operations. Besides, our construction satisfies the strongest notion of correctness given by Hada (Eurocrypt 2010). We also strengthen the black-box security model for encryption - re-encryption system proposed by Hohenberger et al. and prove the average-case virtual black box property of our obfuscator as well as the security of our encryption - re-encryption system (in the strengthened model) under the DDH assumption. All our proofs are in the standard model.

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