Paper 2002/060 Original: eprint.iacr.org/2002/060 ↗

A Forward-Secure Public-Key Encryption Scheme

Abstract

Cryptographic computations are often carried out on insecure devices for which the threat of key exposure represents a serious and realistic concern. In an effort to mitigate the damage caused by exposure of secret data stored on such devices, the paradigm of \emph{forward security} was introduced. In this model, secret keys are updated at regular intervals throughout the lifetime of the system; furthermore, exposure of a secret key corresponding to a given interval does not enable an adversary to ``break'' the system (in the appropriate sense) for any \emph{prior} time period. A number of constructions of forward-secure digital signature schemes and symmetric-key schemes are known. We present the first construction of a forward-secure public-key encryption scheme whose security is based on the bilinear Diffie-Hellman assumption in the random oracle model. Our scheme can be extended to achieve chosen-ciphertext security at minimal additional cost. The construction we give is quite efficient: all parameters of the scheme grow (at most) poly-logarithmically with the total number of time periods.