Anonymous identity-based broadcast encryption technology for smart city information system

A smart city can utilize information and communication technologies to minimize energy, waste, and resource consumption and attain high-efficiency services, so it directly improves the life quality of all residents. However, it also brings about some security and privacy challenges. For instance, once the ubiquitous network in the smart city is attacked, all of the sensitive information and residents’ identities will be revealed. In many application scenarios, the anonymity of residents is a desirable security property. After all, nobody wants to be traced for his daily activity or personal habits. In this paper, we propose a generic identity-based broadcast encryption scheme which can satisfy information’s confidentiality and users’ anonymity simultaneously under chosen-ciphertext attacks. What is different from our previous work which was published in ACISP 2016 is that we present the proof of confidentiality and focus on the application environment. The generic IBBE construction has a desirable property that its public parameter size and private key size are constant as well as its decryption cost is independent of the number of receivers. Thus, no matter from which point of views, the construction is very appropriate for smart city information system.