Public key encryption supporting plaintext equality test and user-specified authorization

In this paper, we investigate a category of public key encryption schemes that supports plaintext equality test and user-specified authorization. With this new primitive, two users, who possess their own public/private key pairs, can issue token(s) to a proxy to authorize it to perform plaintext equality test from their ciphertexts. We provide a formal formulation for this primitive and present a construction with provable security in our security model. To mitigate the risks against the semi-trusted proxies, we enhance the proposed cryptosystem by integrating the concept of computational client puzzles. As a showcase, we construct a secure personal health record application on the basis of this primitive. Copyright (C) 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.