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Match Me if You Can: Matchmaking Encryption and Its Applications

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Abstract

We introduce a new form of encryption that we name matchmaking encryption (ME). Using ME, sender S and receiver R (each with its own attributes) can both specify policies the other party must satisfy in order for the message to be revealed. The main security guarantee is that of privacy-preserving policy matching: During decryption, nothing is leaked beyond the fact that a match occurred/did not occur. ME opens up new ways of secretly communicating and enables several new applications where both participants can specify fine-grained access policies to encrypted data. For instance, in social matchmaking, S can encrypt a file containing his/her personal details and specify a policy so that the file can be decrypted only by his/her ideal partner. On the other end, a receiver R will be able to decrypt the file only if S corresponds to his/her ideal partner defined through a policy. On the theoretical side, we define security for ME, as well as provide generic frameworks for constructing ME from functional encryption. These constructions need to face the technical challenge of simultaneously checking the policies chosen by S and R, to avoid any leakage. On the practical side, we construct an efficient identity-based scheme for equality policies, with provable security in the random oracle model under the standard BDH assumption. We implement and evaluate our scheme and provide experimental evidence that our construction is practical. We also apply identity-based ME to a concrete use case, in particular for creating an anonymous bulletin board over a Tor network.

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Notes

  1. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_drop.

  2. See https://www.news.ucsb.edu/2019/019308/anonymous-yet-trustworthy.

  3. Some PE schemes satisfy a stronger attribute-hiding security definition, i.e., the attribute x remains hidden even when \(f(x)=1\).

  4. Often, and equivalently, FE schemes are parameterized by a function ensemble \(\mathcal {F}= \{f_k:\mathcal {X}\times \mathcal {R}\rightarrow \mathcal {Y}\}_{k\in \mathcal {K}}\).

  5. Note that malleability (and thus the authenticity property considered in our paper) might be a desirable feature in some scenarios, as it implies a form of deniability. It could also be useful in future extensions of ME (e.g., in the spirit of proxy re-encryption).

  6. This is not an issue for an ME that supports arbitrary policies, as in that case, a single policy encodes a large number of attributes.

  7. This attack can be generalized to show that privacy does not hold if the \(\mathsf {PolGen}\) algorithm (and thus the policy key \(\mathsf {kpol}\)) is made public.

  8. This can be achieved, e.g., by setting , and by appending to each message the string .

  9. It is important to recall that a similar guarantee does not hold in the identity-based setting, when the receiver is semi-honest (cf. Sect. 5.1).

  10. This choice of parameters does not take into account the quadratic loss depending on the number of queries \(q_R\) and \(q_S\) in Lemmas 7–8. To increase the level of security, we suggest adopting stronger curves such as, e.g., curve SS1024 in Charm that guarantees 112 bits of security.

  11. https://github.com/cygnusv/matchmaking-encryption.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Stevens Institute of Technology, Hoboken, NJ, USA

    Giuseppe Ateniese & Danilo Francati

  2. NuCypher, San Francisco, CA, USA

    David Nuñez

  3. Sapienza University of Rome, Rome, Italy

    Daniele Venturi

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  1. Giuseppe Ateniese
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  2. Danilo Francati
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Correspondence to Danilo Francati.

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Communicated by Marc Fischlin

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An abridged version of this paper appears in the Proceedings of the 39th International Cryptology Conference (CRYPTO 2019).

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Ateniese, G., Francati, D., Nuñez, D. et al. Match Me if You Can: Matchmaking Encryption and Its Applications. J Cryptol 34, 16 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00145-021-09381-4

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