Proxy re-encryption with keyword search

Abstract

We introduce a new cryptographic primitive, called proxy re-encryption with keyword search, which is motivated by the following scenario in email systems: Charlie sends an encrypted email, which contains some keywords, such as “urgent”, to Alice under Alice’s public key, and Alice delegates her decryption rights to Bob via her mail server. The desired situations are: (1) Bob can decrypt mails delegated from Alice by using only his private key, (2) Bob’s mail gateway, with a trapdoor from Bob, can test whether the email delegated from Alice contains some keywords, such as “urgent”, (3) Alice and Bob do not wish to give the mail server or mail gateway the access to the content of emails. The function of proxy re-encryption with keyword search (PRES) is the combination of proxy re-encryption (PRE) and public key encryption with keyword search (PEKS). However, a PRES scheme cannot be obtained by directly combining those two schemes, since the resulting scheme is no longer proven secure in our security model. In this paper, a concrete construction is proposed, which is proven secure in the random oracle model, based on the modified Decisional Bilinear Diffie–Hellman assumption.