Publications

A key exposure problem is unavoidable since it seems human error can never be eliminated completely, and key-insulated encryption is one of the cryptographic solutions to the problem. At Asiacrypt’05, Hanaoka et al. introduced hierarchical key-insulation functionality, which is attractive functionality that enhances key exposure resistance, and proposed an identity-based hierarchical key-insulated encryption (hierarchical IKE) scheme in the random oracle model. In this paper, we first propose the hierarchical IKE scheme in the standard model (i.e., without random oracles). Our hierarchical IKE scheme is secure under the symmetric external Diffie–Hellman (SXDH) assumption, which is a static assumption. Particularly, in the non-hierarchical case, our construction is the first IKE scheme that achieves constant-size parameters including public parameters, secret keys, and ciphertexts. Furthermore, we also propose the first public-key-based key-insulated encryption (PK-KIE) in the hierarchical setting by using our technique.