Paper 2003/182

Chosen-Ciphertext Security from Identity-Based Encryption

Ran Canetti, Shai Halevi, and Jonathan Katz

Abstract

We show how to construct a CCA-secure public-key encryption scheme from any CPA-secure identity-based encryption (IBE) scheme. Our conversion from IBE to a CCA-secure scheme is simple, efficient, and provably secure in the standard model (i.e., security of the resulting scheme does not rely on the random oracle model). In addition, the resulting scheme achieves CCA security even if the underlying IBE scheme satisfies only a ``weak'' notion of security which is known to be achievable in the standard model based on the bilinear Diffie-Hellman assumption. Thus, our results yield a new construction of CCA-secure public-key encryption in the standard model. Interestingly, the resulting scheme avoids any non-interactive proofs of ``well-formedness'' which were shown to underlie all previously-known constructions. We also extend our technique to obtain a simple and reasonably efficient method for securing any BTE scheme against adaptive chosen-ciphertext attacks. This, in turn, yields more efficient constructions of CCA-secure (hierarchical) identity-based and forward-secure encryption schemes in the standard model. Our results --- building on previous black-box separations --- rule out black-box constructions of IBE from CPA-secure public-key encryption.