Abstract:Since the Snowden revelations, threats from backdoor attacks represented by algorithm substitution attack (ASA) have been widely concerned. This kind of attack subverts the process of the algorithm that tampers with the cryptographic protocol participants in an undetectable manner, which embeds backdoors to obtain secrets. Building a cryptographic reverse firewall (CRF) for protocol participants is a well-known and feasible approach against ASA. Identity-based encryption (IBE), as a quite applicable public key infrastructure, has vital importance to be protected by appropriate CRF schemes. However, the existing work only realizes the CRF re-randomization, ignoring the security risk of sending users’ private keys directly to the third-party CRF. Given the above problem, the formal definition and security model of security properties of CRF applicable to IBE are proposed. Then, the formal definition of rerandomizable and key-malleable secure channel free IBE (RKM-SCF-IBE) and the method of transforming traditional IBE to RKM-SFC-IBE are presented. In addition, an approach to increasing anonymity is also given. Finally, a generic provably secure framework of CRF construction for IBE is proposed based on RKM-SFC-IBE, with several instantiations from classic IBE schemes in the standard model and simulation results with optimization methods. Compared with existing work, the proposed scheme is proven secure under a more complete security model with a generic approach to building CRF for IBE schemes and clarifies the basic principles when constructing CRF for more expressive encryption schemes.