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A secure messaging protocol, such as the Signal protocol, provides end-to-end encrypted asynchronous communication. This paper focuses on a secure group messaging (SGM) protocol, and proposes a method capable of hiding membership information from the viewpoint of non group members, which we call “membership privacy”. In this work, we add membership privacy to the Asynchronous Ratcheting Trees (ART) protocol (proposed by Cohn-Gordon et al., (ACM CCS 2018)). For hiding membership-related values in the setup phase, we employ a key-private and robust publickey encryption (Abdalla et al., TCC2010/JoC2018). Moreover, we introduce a group common key to encrypt membership information in the key update phase. Our modification achieves asymptotically the same efficiency of the ART protocol in the setup phase. Any additional cost for key update does not depend on the number of group members. Therefore, the proposed protocol can add membership privacy to the ART protocol with a quite small overhead. Specifically, one encryption and decryption of a symmetric-key encryption scheme and one execution of a key-derivation function for each key update are employed. Finally, we discuss how to extend our protocol to provide sender-specific authentication, dynamic groups, group-size hiding, and how to adopt our technique to the Messaging Layer Security (MLS) protocol. We note that, although Chase et al. (ACM CCS 2020) have considered the same notion, their proposal is an extension of Signal so called “Pairwise Signal” where a group message is repeatedly sent over individual Signal channels. Thus their protocol is not scalable.

Revocable identity-based encryption (RIBE) is an extension of IBE with an efficient key revocation mechanism. Revocable hierarchical IBE (RHIBE) is its further extension with key delegation functionality. Although there are various adaptively secure pairing-based RIBE schemes, all known hierarchical analogues only satisfy selective security. In addition, the currently known most efficient adaptively secure RIBE and selectively secure RHIBE schemes rely on non-standard assumptions, which are referred to as the augmented DDH assumption and q-type assumptions, respectively. In this paper, we propose a simple but effective design methodology for RHIBE schemes. We provide a generic design framework for RHIBE based on an HIBE scheme with a few properties. Fortunately, several state-of-the-art pairing-based HIBE schemes have the properties. In addition, our construction preserves the sizes of master public keys, ciphertexts, and decryption keys, as well as the complexity assumptions of the underlying HIBE scheme. Thus, we obtain the first RHIBE schemes with adaptive security under the standard k-linear assumption. We prove adaptive security by developing a new proof technique for RHIBE. Due to the compactness-preserving construction, the proposed R(H)IBE schemes have similar efficiencies to the most efficient existing schemes.

Revocation functionality is vital to real-world cryptographic systems for managing their reliability. In the context of identity-based encryption (IBE), Boldyreva, Goyal, and Kumar (ACM CCS 2008) first showed an efficient revocation method for IBE, and such an IBE scheme with the scalable revocation method is called revocable IBE (RIBE). Seo and Emura (PKC 2013) introduced a new security notion, called decryption key exposure resistance (DKER), which is a desirable security notion for RIBE. However, all existing RIBE schemes that achieve adaptive security with DKER require long public parameters or composite-order bilinear groups. In this paper, we first show an RIBE scheme that (1) satisfies adaptive security; (2) achieves DKER; (3) realizes constant-size public parameters; and (4) is constructed over prime-order bilinear groups. Our core technique relies on Seo and Emura's one (PKC 2013), which transform the Waters IBE (EUROCRYPT 2005) to the corresponding RIBE scheme. Specifically, we construct an IBE scheme that satisfies constant-size public parameters over prime-order groups and some requirements for the Seo-Emura technique, and then transform the IBE scheme to an RIBE scheme. We also discuss how to extend the proposed RIBE scheme to a chosen-ciphertext secure one and server-aided one (ESORICS 2015).