Ciphertext-Policy Delegatable Hidden Vector Encryption and Its Application

摘要

We propose a new hidden vector encryption (HVE) scheme that we call a ciphertext-policy delegatable hidden vector encryption (CP-dHVE) scheme. Several HVE schemes have been proposed and their properties have been analyzed extensively. Nonetheless, the definition of the HVE has been left unchanged. We therefore reconsider it, and point out that the conventional HVE should be categorized as the key-policy HVE, because the vectors corresponding to the secret keys can contain wildcards (which specify an access policy) whereas those corresponding to the ciphertexts cannot contain them. We then formalize its dual concept, the ciphertext-policy HVE, and propose a concrete scheme. Then, as an application of our scheme, we propose a public-key encryption with conjunctive keyword search scheme that can be used in the hierarchical user systems. Our scheme is novel in that the ciphertext size grows logarithmically to the number of uses in the system, while that of a conventional scheme grows linearly.