Multi-use and unidirectional identity-based proxy re-encryption schemes

In a proxy re-encryption scheme, a semi-trusted proxy is given special power that allows it to transform a ciphertext for Alice into a ciphertext for Bob without learning any information about the messages encrypted under either key. When a proxy re-encryption scheme is constructed in an identity-based setting, it means that a proxy converts a ciphertext encrypted under Alice’s identity into a ciphertext under Bob’s. Proxy re-encryption has become more and more popular these years due to the fact that it has many practical applications. In this paper, we present an IND-CCA2 secure identity-based proxy re-encryption scheme which has several useful properties, including, multi-use, unidirectionality, etc. Finding a unidirectional, multi-use, and CCA2-secure proxy re-encryption scheme is presented as an open problem by Green et al. Fortunately, our identity-based proxy re-encryption scheme is a solution to this problem. As a middleware for fulfilling our main goal, we also propose a new construction of identity-based encryption using random padding techniques. The security of our schemes is based on the standard decisional bilinear Diffie–Hellman assumption in the random oracle model.