A Brief History of Provably-Secure Public-Key Encryption

Public-key encryption schemes are a useful and interesting field of cryptographic study. The ultimate goal for the cryptographer in the field of public-key encryption would be the production of a very efficient encryption scheme with a proof of security in a strong security model using a weak and reasonable computational assumption. This ultimate goal has yet to be reached. In this invited paper, we survey the major results that have been achieved in the quest to find such a scheme

Chosen-Ciphertext Secure RSA-type Cryptosystems

This paper explains how to design fully secure RSA-type cryptosystems from schemes only secure against passive attacks, in the standard model. We rely on instance-independence assumptions, which, roughly speaking, conjecture that for certain problems, an interactive access to a solver for another problem does not help the challenger. Previously, instance-independence assumptions were used in a negative way, to prove that certain schemes proven in the random oracle model were not provable in the standard model. Our paradigm applies virtually to all (weakly secure) RSA-type encryption schemes for which public-key RSA exponent can be arbitrarily chosen. As an illustration, we present a chosen-ciphertext secure variant of the Naccache-Stern encryption scheme

Improvements and Generalisations of Signcryption Schemes

In this work, we study the cryptographic primitive: signcryption, which combines the functionalities of digital signatures and public-key encryption. We first propose two generic transforms from meta-ElGamal signature schemes to signcryption schemes. These constructions can be thought of as generalisations of the signcryption schemes by Zheng and Gamage et al. Our results show that a large class of signcryption schemes arc outsider IND-CCA2 secure and insider UF-CMA secure. As a by-product, we also show that the meta-EIGamal signature schemes, for which no previous formal security proofs have been shown, arc UF-CMA secure. \Ve then propose a modification of one of the transforms in order to achieve insider IXD-CCA2 security in addition to insider UF-CMA security. This modification COStS just one extra exponential operation. In particular, we can apply this modification to the Zheng signcryption scheme to make it fully insider secure. Finally, we propose a generic transform from a two-key signcryption scheme to a one-key signcryption scheme while preserving both confidentiality and unforgeability. Our result shows that if we have an insider I)JD•CCA2 and CFC1A secure two-key signcryption scheme, then it can be turned into an insider IND-CCA2 and CF•CMA secure one• key signcryption scheme. We also show that an insider IND•CCA2 and UF-CMA secure one• key signcryption scheme induces a secure combined public• key scheme; that is, a combination of a signature scheme and a public• key encryption scheme that can securely share the same key pair. Combining previous results suggests that we can obtain a large class of insider secure one-key signcryption schemes from meta-ElGamal signature schemes, and that each of them can induce a secure combined public-key scheme.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo