Improving the trade-off between storage and communication in broadcast encryption schemes Original Research Article

The most important point in the design of broadcast encryption schemes (BESs) is to obtain a good trade-off between the amount of secret information that must be stored by every user and the length of the broadcast message, which are measured, respectively, by the information rate ρ and the broadcast information rate ρB. In this paper, we present a simple method to combine two given BESs in order to improve the trade-off between ρ and ρB by finding BESs with good information rate ρ for arbitrarily many different values of the broadcast information rate ρB. We apply this technique to threshold (R,T)-BESs and we present a method to obtain, for every rational value 1/R⩽ρB⩽1, a (R,T)-BES with optimal information rate ρ among all (R,T)-BESs that can be obtained by combining two of the (R,T)-BESs proposed by Blundo et al. (Lecture Notes in Comput. Sci. 1190 (1996) 387–400).