In this study, the authors present an efficient public-key broadcast encryption (PKBE) scheme with sub-linear size of public keys, private keys and ciphertexts and prove its adaptive security under standard assumptions. Compared with the currently best scheme of Garg et al. (CCS 2010) that provides adaptive security under standard assumptions and sub-linear size of various parameters, the ciphertext size of the author’s scheme is 94% shorter and the encryption algorithm of their scheme is also 2.8 times faster than the scheme of Garg et al.

To achieve their scheme, they adapt the dual system encryption technique of Waters. However, there is a challenging problem to use this technique for the construction of PKBE with sub-linear size of ciphertexts such as a tag compression problem. To overcome this problem, they first devise a novel tag update technique for broadcast encryption. Using this technique, they build an efficient PKBE scheme in symmetric bilinear groups, and prove its adaptive security under standard assumptions.