Identity-Based Authenticated Encryption with Identity Confidentiality

Identity-based cryptography (IBC) is fundamental to security and privacy protection. Identity-based authenticated encryption (i.e., signcryption) is an important IBC primitive, which has numerous and promising applications. After two decades of research on signcryption, recently a new cryptographic primitive, named higncryption, was proposed. Higncryption can be viewed as privacy-enhanced signcryption, which integrates public key encryption, entity authentication, and identity concealment (which is not achieved in signcryption) into a monolithic primitive. Here, briefly speaking, identity concealment means that the transcript of protocol runs should not leak participants' identity information. In this work, we propose the first identity-based higncryption (IBHigncryption). The most impressive feature of IBHigncryption, among others, is its simplicity and efficiency. The proposed IBHigncryption scheme is essentially as efficient as the fundamental CCA-secure Boneh-Franklin IBE scheme [12], while offering entity authentication and identity concealment simultaneously. Compared to the identity-based signcryption scheme [8], which is adopted in the IEEE P1363.3 standard, our IBHigncryption scheme is much simpler, and has significant efficiency advantage in total. Besides, our IBHigncryption enjoys forward ID-privacy, receiver deniability and x-security simultaneously. In addition, the proposed IBHigncryption has a much simpler setup stage with smaller public parameters, which in particular does not have the traditional master public key.