Securing Threshold Cryptosystems against Chosen Ciphertext Attack

Abstract

For the most compelling applications of threshold cryptosystems, security against chosen cipher text attack is a requirement. However, prior to the results presented here, there appeared to be no practical threshold cryptosystems in the literature that were provably chosen ciphertext secure, even in the idealized random oracle model. The contribution of this paper is to present two very practical threshold cryptosystems, and to prove that they are secure against chosen ciphertext attack in the random oracle model. Not only are these protocols computationally very efficient, but they are also non-interactive, which means they can be easily run over an asynchronous communication network.