Privacy-preserving identity-based broadcast encryption

Broadcast encryption enables a broadcaster to encrypt messages and transmit them to some subset S of authorized users. In identity-based broadcast encryption schemes, a broadcasting sender typically encrypts a message by combining public identities of receivers in S and system parameters. However, previous identity-based broadcast encryption schemes have not been concerned about preserving the privacy of receivers. Consequently, all of the identities of broadcast receivers in S are exposed to the public in the previous schemes, which may be subject to attacks on user privacy in lots of pragmatic applications. We propose a novel privacy-preserving identity-based broadcast encryption scheme against an active attacker. The proposed scheme protects the privacy of receivers of broadcasted messages by hiding the identities of receivers in S. Additionally, it achieves less storage and computation costs required to encrypt and decrypt the broadcast message, compared to the previous identity-based broadcast encryption schemes that do not provide user privacy.