Security of a biometric identity-based encryption scheme

TL;DR

This paper critically examines a recent biometric identity-based encryption scheme, revealing that it is vulnerable to chosen-plaintext attacks despite claims of security against adaptive chosen-ciphertext attacks.

Contribution

The paper demonstrates that the proposed Bio-IBE scheme is not secure against chosen-plaintext attacks, challenging previous security claims and highlighting the need for more robust designs.

Findings

The scheme is vulnerable to chosen-plaintext attacks.

User secret keys can decrypt ciphertexts under unrelated identities.

Previous security proofs do not hold under practical attack scenarios.

Abstract

Biometric identity-based encryption (Bio-IBE) is a kind of fuzzy identity-based encryption (fuzzy IBE) where a ciphertext encrypted under an identity w' can be decrypted using a secret key corresponding to the identity w which is close to w' as measured by some metric. Recently, Yang et al. proposed a constant-size Bio-IBE scheme and proved that it is secure against adaptive chosen-ciphertext attack (CCA2) in the random oracle model. Unfortunately, in this paper, we will show that their Bio-IBE scheme is even not chosen-plaintext secure. Specifically, user w using his secret key is able to decrypt any ciphertext encrypted under an identity w' even though w is not close to w'.