IACR News item: 02 February 2016
Romain Gay, Dennis Hofheinz, Eike Kiltz, Hoeteck Wee
ePrint Report
We present the first CCA-secure public-key encryption scheme based on DDH where the
security loss is independent of the number of challenge ciphertexts and the number of decryption queries.
Our construction extends also to the standard k-Lin assumption in pairing-free groups, whereas all prior
constructions starting with Hofheinz and Jager (Crypto 12) rely on the use of pairings. Moreover, our
construction improves upon the concrete efficiency of existing schemes, reducing the ciphertext overhead
by about half (to only 3 group elements under DDH), in addition to eliminating the use of pairings.
We also show how to use our techniques in the NIZK setting. Specifically, we construct the first tightly
simulation-sound designated-verifier NIZK for linear languages without pairings. Using pairings, we can
turn our construction into a highly optimized publicly verifiable NIZK with tight simulation-soundness.
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