We design a linearly homomorphic encryption scheme whose security relies on the hardness of the decisional Diffie-Hellman problem. Our approach requires some special features of the underlying group. In particular, its order is unknown and it contains a subgroup in which the discrete logarithm problem is tractable. Therefore, our instantiation holds in the class group of a non maximal order of an imaginary quadratic field. Its algebraic structure makes it possible to obtain such a linearly homomorphic scheme whose message space is the whole set of integers modulo a prime p and which supports an unbounded number of additions modulo p from the ciphertexts. A notable difference with previous works is that, for the first time, the security does not depend on the hardness of the factorization of integers. As a consequence, under some conditions, the prime p can be scaled to fit the application needs.

Functional encryption is a modern public-key cryptographic primitive allowing an encryptor to finely control the information revealed to recipients from a given ciphertext. Abdalla, Bourse, De Caro, and Pointcheval (PKC 2015) were the first to consider functional encryption restricted to the class of linear functions, i.e. inner products. Though their schemes are only secure in the selective model, Agrawal, Libert, and Stehlé (CRYPTO 16) soon provided adaptively secure schemes for the same functionality. These constructions, which rely on standard assumptions such as the Decision Diffie-Hellman (DDH), the Learning-with-Errors (LWE), and Paillier's Decision Composite Residuosity (DCR) problems, do however suffer of various practical drawbacks. Namely, the DCR based scheme only computes inner products modulo an RSA integer which is oversized for many practical applications, while the computation of inner products modulo a prime p either requires, for their (DDH) based scheme, that the inner product be contained in a sufficiently small interval for decryption to be efficient, or, as in the LWE based scheme, suffers of poor efficiency due to impractical parameters. In this paper, we provide adaptively secure functional encryption schemes for the inner product functionality which are both efficient and allow for the evaluation of unbounded inner products modulo a prime p. Our constructions rely on new natural cryptographic assumptions in a cyclic group containing a subgroup where the discrete logarithm (DL) problem is easy which extend Castagnos and Laguillaumie's assumption (RSA 2015) of a DDH group with an easy DL subgroup. Instantiating our generic construction using class groups of imaginary quadratic fields gives rise to the most efficient functional encryption for inner products modulo an arbitrary large prime p. One of our schemes outperforms the DCR variant of Agrawal et al.'s protocols in terms of size of keys and ciphertexts by factors varying between 2 and 20 for a 112-bit security.