A generic construction for revocable identity-based encryption with subset difference methods.

To deal with dynamically changing user's credentials in identity-based encryption (IBE), providing an efficient key revocation method is a very important issue. Recently, Ma and Lin proposed a generic method of designing a revocable IBE (RIBE) scheme that uses the complete subtree (CS) method by combining IBE and hierarchical IBE (HIBE) schemes. In this paper, we propose a new generic method for designing an RIBE scheme that uses the subset difference (SD) method instead of using the CS method. In order to use the SD method, we generically design an RIBE scheme by combining IBE, identity-based revocation (IBR), and two-level HIBE schemes. If the underlying IBE, IBR, and HIBE schemes are adaptively (or selectively) secure, then our RIBE scheme is also adaptively (or selectively) secure. In addition, we show that the layered SD (LSD) method can be applied to our RIBE scheme and a chosen-ciphertext secure RIBE scheme also can be designed generically.