Compact public key encryption without full random oracles

Achieving shorter ciphertext length under weaker assumptions in chosen-ciphertext (CCA) secure public-key encryption (PKE) is one of the most important research topics in cryptography. However, it is also known that it is hard to construct a CCA-secure PKE whose ciphertext overhead is less than two group elements in the underlying prime-order group under non-interactive assumptions. A naive approach for achieving more compactness than the above bound is to use random oracles (ROs), but the full RO has various ideal properties like programmability. In this paper, we pursue how to achieve compact PKE only with a minimum ideal property of ROs. Specifically, only with observability, we can give three CCA-secure PKE schemes whose ciphertext overhead is less than two group elements. Our schemes are provably secure under standard assumptions such as the CDH and DDH assumptions. This study shows that ideal properties other than observability are not necessary to construct compact PKE beyond the bound. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.