The public key encryption with keyword search (PEKS) scheme recently proposed by Boneh, Di Crescenzo, Ostrovsky, and Persiano enables one to search encrypted keywords without compromising the security of the original data. In this paper, we address three important issues of a PEKS scheme, "refreshing keywords", "removing secure channel", and "processing multiple keywords", which have not been considered in Boneh et. al.'s paper. We argue that care must be taken when keywords are used frequently in the PEKS scheme as this situation might contradict the security of PEKS. We then point out the inefficiency of the original PEKS scheme due to the use of the secure channel. We resolve this problem by constructing an efficient PEKS scheme that removes secure channel. Finally, we propose a PEKS scheme that encrypts multiple keywords efficiently.

In this paper, we construct an efficient "multi-receiver identity-based encryption scheme". Our scheme only needs one (or none if precomputed and provided as a public parameter) pairing computation to encrypt a single message for n receivers, in contrast to the simple construction that re-encrypts a message n times using Boneh and Franklin's identity-based encryption scheme, considered previously in the literature. We extend our scheme to give adaptive chosen ciphertext security. We support both schemes with security proofs under precisely defined formal security model. Finally, we discuss how our scheme can lead to a highly efficient public key broadcast encryption scheme based on the "subset-cover" framework.

Abstract. "Certificateless Public Key Cryptography" has very appealing features, namely it does not require any public key certification (cf. traditional Public Key Cryptography) nor having key escrow problem (cf. Identity-Based Cryptography). Unfortunately, construction of Certificateless Public Key Encryption (CLPKE) schemes has so far depended on the use of Identity-Based Encryption, which results in the bilinear pairing-based schemes that need costly operations. In this paper, we consider a relaxation of the original model of CLPKE and propose a new CLPKE scheme that does not depend on the bilinear pairings. We prove that in the random oracle model, our scheme meets the strong security requirements of the new model of CLPKE such as security against public key replacement attack and chosen ciphertext attack, assuming that the standard Computational Diffie-Hellman problem is intractable.

In this paper, we examine issues related to the construction of identity-based threshold decryption schemes and argue that it is important in practice to design an identity-based threshold decryption scheme in which a private key associated with an identity is shared. A major contribution of this paper is to construct the first identity-based threshold decryption scheme secure against chosen-ciphertext attack. A formal proof of security of the scheme is provided in the random oracle model, assuming the Bilinear Diffie-Hellman problem is computationally hard. Another contribution of this paper is, by extending the proposed identity-based threshold decryption scheme, to construct a mediated identity-based encryption scheme secure against more powerful attacks than those considered previously.

Smart grid is a technological innovation that improves efficiency, reliability, economics, and sustainability of electricity services. It plays a crucial role in modern energy infrastructure. The main challenges of smart grids, however, are how to manage different types of front-end intelligent devices such as power assets and smart meters efficiently; and how to process a huge amount of data received from these devices. Cloud computing, a technology that provides computational resources on demands, is a good candidate to address these challenges since it has several good properties such as energy saving, cost saving, agility, scalability and flexibility. In this paper, we propose a secure cloud computing based framework for big data information management in smart grids, which we call "Smart-Frame." The main idea of our framework is to build a hierarchical structure of cloud computing centers to provide different types of computing services for information management and big data analysis. In addition to this structural framework, we present a security solution based on identity-based encryption, signature and proxy re-encryption to address critical security issues of the proposed framework.