Deniable Functional Encryption

Deniable encryption, first introduced by Canetti et al. (CRYPTO 1997), allows a sender and/or receiver of encrypted communication to produce fake but authentic-looking coins and/or secret keys that “open” the communication to a different message. Here we initiate its study for the more general case of functional encryption (FE), as introduced by Boneh et al. (TCC 2011), wherein a receiver in possession of a key k can compute from any encryption of a message x the value F(k, x) according to the scheme’s functionality F. Our results are summarized as follows: We put forth and motivate the concept of deniable FE, for which we consider two models. In the first model, as previously considered by O’Neill et al. (CRYPTO 2011) in the case of identity-based encryption, a receiver gets assistance from the master authority to generate a fake secret key. In the second model, there are “normal” and “deniable” secret keys, and a receiver in possession of a deniable secret key can ...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2016
• Where: PKC
• Authors: Angelo De Caro, Vincenzo Iovino, Adam O'Neill
• Keywords: Cryptology, PKC 2016