Membership Encryption and Its Applications

We propose a new encryption primitive called Membership Encryption. Let P(G) be a privacy-preserving token on a group attribute/identity G, such that given P(G) it is hard to know the attributes in G. In this membership encryption, if an encryption takes as input an attribute A and the token P(G) , the decryption requires holding the membership A ∈ G, i.e., A belongs to this group attribute. Membership encryption is applicable in constructing membership proof A∈P(G) with privacy preserving on group attribute and the membership. Membership encryption can be also utilized to construct an efficient two-round K-out-of-N oblivious transfer protocol. In this paper, we construct a provably secure membership encryption where the group token P(G) is constant-size with maximum number accountability on attributes. Using our scheme, the proposed oblivious transfer protocol exhibits the nice feature of O(1) communication cost for any K from receiver to sender, and O(N) communication cost from sender to receiver.