The Direction of Updatable Encryption Does Not Matter Much

Abstract

Updatable encryption schemes allow for key rotation on ciphertexts. A client outsourcing storage of encrypted data to a cloud server can change its encryption key. The cloud server can update the stored ciphertexts to the new key using only a token provided by the client.

This paper solves two open problems in updatable encryption, that of uni-directional vs. bi-directional updates, and post-quantum security.

The main result in this paper is to analyze the security notions based on uni- and bi-directional updates. Surprisingly, we prove that uni- and bi-directional variants of each security notion are equivalent.

The second result in this paper is to provide a new and efficient updatable encryption scheme based on the Decisional Learning with Error assumption. This gives us post-quantum security. Our scheme is bi-directional, but because of our main result, this is sufficient.