Predicate encryption with selective-opening security for receivers: formal definition, generic construction, and concrete instantiations for several primitives

With the rise of cloud computing, multi-user scenarios have become a common setting for data sharing nowadays. The conservative security notion might not be sufficient for such a data sharing model. As a response to this challenge, there has been significant research targeting security against receiver selective-opening (RSO) attacks. However, we found that none of these studies discuss RSO security specifically for predicate encryption (PE)—an encryption mechanism naturally designed for multi-user data sharing. This manuscript first formalizes the RSO security for PE. We then present a generic PE construction that achieves RSO security based on the simulation-based definition. Our work also features several instantiations for various predicate families, including attribute-based encryption for the monotone span program, which is known as one of the most expressive PE.