Cryptanalysis of a Hierarchical Identity-Based Encryption Scheme

Abstract

Hierarchical Identity-Based Encryption (HIBE) is a generalization of identity-based encryption that mirrors an organizational hierarchy, and allows the root Private Key Generator (PKG) to distribute the workload of key generations to lower-level PKGs. In Indocrypt'08, Ren and Gu proposed a new HIBE scheme, and claimed that their scheme is fully chosen-ciphertext secure in the standard model. However, by giving a concrete attack, we show that Ren-Gu's HIBE is even not chosen-plaintext secure.