Efficient identity-based threshold decryption scheme from bilinear pairings

Abstract

Using Shamir’s secret sharing scheme to indirectly share the identity-based private key in the form of a pairing group element, we propose an efficient identity-based threshold decryption scheme from pairings and prove its security in the random oracle model. This new paring-based scheme features a few improvements compared with other schemes in the literature. The two most noticeable features are its efficiency, by drastically reducing the number of pairing computations, and the ability it gives the user to share the identity-based private key without requiring any access to a private key generator. With the ability it gives the user to share the identity-based private key, our ID-based threshold decryption (IBTD) scheme, the second of its kind, is significantly more efficient than the first scheme, which was developed by Baek and Zheng, at the expense of a slightly increased ciphertext length. In fact, our IBTD scheme tries to use as few bilinear pairings as possible, especially without depending on the suite of Baek–Zheng secret sharing tools based on pairings.