Verifiable Functional Encryption

In light of security challenges that have emerged in a world with complex networks and cloud computing, the notion of functional encryption has recently emerged. In this work, we show that in several applications of functional encryption (even those cited in the earliest works on functional encryption), the formal notion of functional encryption is actually not sufficient to guarantee security. This is essentially because the case of a malicious authority and/or encryptor is not considered. To address this concern, we put forth the concept of verifiable functional encryption, which captures the basic requirement of output correctness: even if the ciphertext is maliciously generated (and even if the setup and key generation is malicious), the decryptor is still guaranteed a meaningful notion of correctness which we show is crucial in several applications.

We formalize the notion of verifiable function encryption and, following prior work in the area, put forth a simulation-based and an indistinguishability-based notion of security. We show that simulation-based verifiable functional encryption is unconditionally impossible even in the most basic setting where there may only be a single key and a single ciphertext. We then give general positive results for the indistinguishability setting: a general compiler from any functional encryption scheme into a verifiable functional encryption scheme with the only additional assumption being the Decision Linear Assumption over Bilinear Groups (DLIN). We also give a generic compiler in the secret-key setting for functional encryption which maintains both message privacy and function privacy. Our positive results are general and also apply to other simpler settings such as Identity-Based Encryption, Attribute-Based Encryption and Predicate Encryption. We also give an application of verifiable functional encryption to the recently introduced primitive of functional commitments. Finally, in the context of indistinguishability obfuscation, there is a fundamental question of whether the correct program was obfuscated. In particular, the recipient of the obfuscated program needs a guarantee that the program indeed does what it was intended to do. This question turns out to be closely related to verifiable functional encryption. We initiate the study of verifiable obfuscation with a formal definition and construction of verifiable indistinguishability obfuscation.