Analysis and improvement of a secret broadcast with binding encryption in broadcasting networks

A secret broadcasting scheme deals with secure transmission of a message so that more than one privileged receiver can decrypt it. Jeong et al. proposed an efficient secret broadcast scheme using binding encryption to obtain the security properties of ind-cpa semantic security and decryption consistency. Thereafter, Wu et al. showed that the Jeong et al.'s scheme just achieves consistency in relatively weak condition and is also inefficient, and they constructed a more efficient scheme to improve the security. In this letter, we demonstrate that theWu et al.'s scheme is also a weak decryption consistency and cannot achieve the decryption consistency if an adversary has the ability to tamper with the ciphertext. We also present an improved and more efficient secret broadcast scheme to remedy the weakness. The proposed scheme achieves decryption consistency and ind-cca security, which can protect against stronger adversary's attacks and allows us to broadcast a digital message securely.