Nowadays, the widely deployed and high performance Internet of Things (IoT) facilitates the communication between its terminal nodes. To enhance data sharing among terminal devices and ensure the recipients’ privacy protection, a few anonymous multi-recipient broadcast encryption (AMBE) proposals are recently given. Nevertheless, the majority of these AMBE proposals are only proven be securely against adaptively chosen plain-text attack (CPA) or selectively chosen ciphertext attack (CCA). Furthermore, all AMBE proposals are subjected to key escrow issue due to inherent characteristics of the ID-based public cryptography (ID-PKC), and cannot furnish secure de-duplication detection. However, for cloud storage, it is very important for expurgating duplicate copies of the identical message since de-duplication can save the bandwidth of network and storage space. To address the above problems, in the work, we present a privacy-preserving multi-receiver certificateless broadcast encryption scheme with de-duplication (PMCBED) in the cloud-computing setting based on certificateless cryptography and anonymous broadcast encryption. In comparison with the prior AMBE proposals, our scheme has the following three characteristics. First, it can fulfill semantic security notions of data-confidentiality and receiver identity anonymity, whereas the existing proposals only accomplish them by formalizing the weaker security models. Second, it achieves duplication detection of the ciphertext for the identical message encrypted with our broadcast encryption. Finally, it also avoids the key escrow problem of the AMBE schemes.

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