Chosen-ciphertext secure anonymous conditional proxy re-encryption with keyword search

Weng et al. introduced the notion of conditional proxy re-encryption (or C-PRE, for

short), whereby only the ciphertext satisfying one condition set by the delegator can

be transformed by the proxy and then decrypted by delegatee. Nonetheless, they left

an open problem on how to construct CCA-secure C-PRE schemes with anonymity.

Fang et al. answered this question by presenting a construction of anonymous condi-

tional proxy re-encryption (C-PRE) scheme without requiring random oracle. Nev-

ertheless, Fang et al.'s scheme only satises the RCCA-security (which is a weaker

variant of CCA-security assuming a harmless mauling of the challenge ciphertext is

tolerated). Hence, it remains an open problem whether CCA-secure C-PRE schemes

that satisfy both anonymity and full CCA-security can really be realized. Shao et al.

introduced a new cryptographic primitive, called proxy re-encryption with keyword

search (PRES), which is a combination of PRE and public key encryption with key-

word search (PEKS), and they left an open problem on how to design an efficient

unidirectional PRES scheme.

In this paper, we answer the above open problems by proposing a new crypto-

graphic primitive called conditional proxy re-encryption with keyword search (C-

PRES), which combines C-PRE and PEKS. We note that there are subtleties in

combining these two notions to achieve a secure scheme, and hence, the combination

is not trivial. We propose a denition of security against chosen ciphertext attacks

for C-PRES schemes with keyword anonymity, and thereafter present a scheme that

satises the denition. The performance of our scheme outperforms Weng et al.'s

construction, which has been regarded as the most efficient C-PRE scheme to date.