Lower Bounds for Private Broadcast Encryption

Broadcast encryption is a type of encryption where the sender can choose a subset from a set of designated receivers on the fly and enable them to decrypt a ciphertext while simultaneously preventing any other party from doing so. The notion of private broadcast encryption extends the primitive to a setting where one wishes to thwart an attacker that additionally attempts to extract information about what is the set of enabled users (rather than the contents of the ciphertext). In this work we provide the first lower bounds for the ciphertext size of private broadcast encryption. We first formulate various notions of privacy for broadcast encryption, (priv-eq, priv-st and priv-full) and classify them in terms of strength. We then show that any private broadcast encryption scheme in the sense of priv-eq (our weakest notion) that satisfies a simple structural condition we formalize and refer to as “atomic” is restricted to have ciphertexts of size Ω(s ·k) where s is the cardinality of the set of the enabled users and k is the security parameter. We then present an atomic private broadcast encryption scheme with ciphertext size Θ(s · k) hence matching our lower bound that relies on key privacy of the underlying encryption. Our results translate to the setting priv-full privacy for a ciphertext size of Θ(n · k) where n is the total number of users while relying only on KEM security. We finally consider arbitrary private broadcast encryption schemes and we show that in the priv-full privacy setting a lower-bound of Ω(n+k) for every ciphertext is imposed. This highlights the costs of privacy in the setting of broadcast encryption where much shorter ciphertexts have been previously attained with various constructions in the non-privacy setting.