Dealerless Corporate Key Generation for Identity-Based Encryption Schemes

Abstract

In Identity-Based Encryption (IBE) system, the Private Key Generator (PKG) holds the master secret key and is responsible for generating private keys for the users. This incurs the key-escrow problem, i.e. the PKG can decrypt any user' any ciphertexts without any possible detection. Also, compromising the master secret key will enable an adversary to do anything to the whole system, and having the master secret key be unavailable implies that new users cannot obtain private keys from the PKG, and existing users cannot get their private keys back from the PKG when they lost them. To address the key-escrow problem and protect the master secret key as much as possible with strong security and availability, distributed PKG protocols supporting threshold policy have been adopted in some IBE schemes. In this paper, we propose a distributed PKG protocol that supports the policy to be any monotonic access structures. Also, we propose the first distributed PKG protocol that supports the dynamic changes of the PKGs and the policy, while remaining the master secret key unchanged. The two protocols do not need any third party acting as a trusted dealer to present, and the master secret key should never be generated or resided in any one single site. The protocols are applicable to a generic IBE template, which covers many existing important IBE schemes. When applied to this generic type of IBE schemes, the two distributed PKG protocols do not affect the encryption and decryption algorithms, and only each user knows his own private key.