Revocable IBE Systems with Almost Constant-Size Key Update

Identity-based encryption (IBE) has been regarded as an attractive alternative to more conventional certificate-based public key systems. It has recently attracted not only considerable research from the academic community, but also interest from the industry and standardization bodies. However, while key revocation is a fundamental requirement to any public key systems, not much work has been done in the identity-based setting. In this paper, we continue the study of revocable IBE (RIBE) initiated by Boldyreva, Goyal, and Kumar. Their proposal of a selective secure RIBE scheme, and a subsequent construction by Libert and Vergnaud in a stronger adaptive security model are based on a binary tree approach, such that their key update size is logarithmic in the number of users. We ask the question of whether or not the key update size could be further reduced by using a cryptographic accumulator. We show that, indeed, the key update material can be made constant with some small amount of auxiliary information, through a novel combination of the Lewko and Waters IBE scheme and the Camenisch, Kohlweiss, and Soriente pairing-based dynamic accumulator.