Certificateless encryption secure against selective opening attack

The notion of selective opening attacks (SOAs) was first introduced by Dwork et al. at FOCS'99. Informally, an encryption scheme is SOA secure if an adversary is given a vector of ciphertexts and can adaptively corrupt some fraction of them by obtaining not only their messages but also their randomness, the uncorrupted ciphertexts retain secure. Provably achieving security against SOA has been proven extremely challenging. In this paper, we propose a security model to capture simulation-based selective opening chosen-plaintext attacks (SIM-SO-CPA) for certificateless encryption. We provide a concrete construction and prove its security in our simulation-based selective opening chosen-plaintext attack security model, based on the real or random and computational Diffie–Hellman assumptions. Compared with previous SOA-secure public key encryption and identity-based encryption, our certificateless encryption scheme is more simple and efficient. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.