Controlled Functional Encryption

Abstract

Motivated by privacy and usability requirements in various scenarios where existing cryptographic tools (like secure multi-party computation and functional encryption) are not adequate, we introduce a new cryptographic tool called Controlled Functional Encryption (C-FE). As in functional encryption, C-FE allows a user (client) to learn only certain functions of encrypted data, using keys obtained from an authority. However, we allow (and require) the client to send a fresh key request to the authority every time it wants to evaluate a function on a ciphertext. We obtain efficient solutions by carefully combining CCA2 secure public-key encryption (or rerandomizable RCCA secure public-key encryption, depending on the nature of security desired) with Yao's garbled circuit. Our main contributions in this work include developing and for- mally defining the notion of C-FE; designing theoretical and practical constructions of C-FE schemes achieving these definitions for specific and general classes of functions; and evaluating the performance of our constructions on various application scenarios.