Improved Self-certified Partially Blind Signature Scheme

Blind signature allows one user to get a signature without giving the signer any information about the actual message or the resulting signature. In this paper, we aim to improve the recently proposed Lin et al.’s Self-certified Partially Blind Signature Scheme[1] in order to withstand the security flaw in their scheme. The security of the improved scheme is enhanced in the blind signing phase of the scheme. The analysis shows that the proposed scheme resolves security problem in Lin et al.’s scheme and also meets the aspects of security features needed by a partial blind signature

Security Analysis and Design of Proxy Signature Schemes over Braid Groups

The braid groups have attracted much attention as a new platform of constructing cryptosystems. This paper firstly analyzes the security vulnerabilities of existing proxy signature schemes over braid groups and presents feasible attacks. Then a new proxy signature scheme is proposed based on the difficulty of the conjugacy search problem and the multiple conjugacy search problem. Security analysis shows that the proposed scheme satisfies the security requirements of proxy signature

Efficient Revocable ID-Based Signature With Cloud Revocation Server

Over the last few years, identity-based cryptosystem (IBC) has attracted widespread attention because it avoids the high overheads associated with public key certificate management. However, an unsolved but critical issue about IBC is how to revoke a misbehaving user. There are some revocable identity-based encryption schemes that have been proposed recently, but little work on the revocation problem of identity-based signature has been undertaken so far. One approach for revocation in identity-based settings is to update users\u27 private keys periodically, which is usually done by the key generation center (KGC). But with this approach, the load on the KGC will increase quickly when the number of users increases. In this paper, we propose an efficient revocable identity-based signature (RIBS) scheme in which the revocation functionality is outsourced to a cloud revocation server (CRS). In our proposed approach, most of the computations needed during key-updates are offloaded to the CRS. We describe the new framework and the security model for the RIBS scheme with CRS and we prove that the proposed scheme is existentially unforgeable against adaptively chosen messages and identity attacks in the random oracle model. Furthermore, we monstrate that our scheme outperforms previous IBS schemes in terms of lower computation and communication costs

A new identity based proxy signature scheme

Proxy signature schemes allow a proxy signer to generate proxy signatures on behalf of an original signer. Mambo et al. first introduced the notion of proxy signature and a lot of research work can be found on this topic nowadays. Recently, many identity based proxy signature schemes were proposed. However, some schemes are vulnerable to proxy key exposure attack. In this paper, we propose a security model for identity based proxy signature schemes. Then an efficient scheme from pairings is presented. The presented scheme is provably secure in the random oracle model. In particular, the new scheme is secure against proxy key exposure attack

Identity based cryptography from pairings.

Yuen Tsz Hon.Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2006.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 109-122).Abstracts in English and Chinese.Abstract --- p.iAcknowledgement --- p.iiiList of Notations --- p.viiiChapter 1 --- Introduction --- p.1Chapter 1.1 --- Identity Based Cryptography --- p.3Chapter 1.2 --- Hierarchical Identity Based Cryptosystem --- p.4Chapter 1.3 --- Our contributions --- p.5Chapter 1.4 --- Publications --- p.5Chapter 1.4.1 --- Publications Produced from This Thesis --- p.5Chapter 1.4.2 --- Publications During Author's Study in the Degree --- p.6Chapter 1.5 --- Thesis Organization --- p.6Chapter 2 --- Background --- p.8Chapter 2.1 --- Complexity Theory --- p.8Chapter 2.1.1 --- Order Notation --- p.8Chapter 2.1.2 --- Algorithms and Protocols --- p.9Chapter 2.1.3 --- Relations and Languages --- p.11Chapter 2.2 --- Algebra and Number Theory --- p.12Chapter 2.2.1 --- Groups --- p.12Chapter 2.2.2 --- Elliptic Curve --- p.13Chapter 2.2.3 --- Pairings --- p.14Chapter 2.3 --- Intractability Assumptions --- p.15Chapter 2.4 --- Cryptographic Primitives --- p.18Chapter 2.4.1 --- Public Key Encryption --- p.18Chapter 2.4.2 --- Digital Signature --- p.19Chapter 2.4.3 --- Zero Knowledge --- p.21Chapter 2.5 --- Hash Functions --- p.23Chapter 2.6 --- Random Oracle Model --- p.24Chapter 3 --- Literature Review --- p.26Chapter 3.1 --- Identity Based Signatures --- p.26Chapter 3.2 --- Identity Based Encryption --- p.27Chapter 3.3 --- Identity Based Signcryption --- p.27Chapter 3.4 --- Identity Based Blind Signatures --- p.28Chapter 3.5 --- Identity Based Group Signatures --- p.28Chapter 3.6 --- Hierarchical Identity Based Cryptography --- p.29Chapter 4 --- Blind Identity Based Signcryption --- p.30Chapter 4.1 --- Schnorr's ROS problem --- p.31Chapter 4.2 --- BIBSC and Enhanced IBSC Security Model --- p.32Chapter 4.2.1 --- Enhanced IBSC Security Model --- p.33Chapter 4.2.2 --- BIBSC Security Model --- p.36Chapter 4.3 --- Efficient and Secure BIBSC and IBSC Schemes --- p.38Chapter 4.3.1 --- Efficient and Secure IBSC Scheme --- p.38Chapter 4.3.2 --- The First BIBSC Scheme --- p.43Chapter 4.4 --- Generic Group and Pairing Model --- p.47Chapter 4.5 --- Comparisons --- p.52Chapter 4.5.1 --- Comment for IND-B --- p.52Chapter 4.5.2 --- Comment for IND-C --- p.54Chapter 4.5.3 --- Comment for EU --- p.55Chapter 4.6 --- Additional Functionality of Our Scheme --- p.56Chapter 4.6.1 --- TA Compatibility --- p.56Chapter 4.6.2 --- Forward Secrecy --- p.57Chapter 4.7 --- Chapter Conclusion --- p.57Chapter 5 --- Identity Based Group Signatures --- p.59Chapter 5.1 --- New Intractability Assumption --- p.61Chapter 5.2 --- Security Model --- p.62Chapter 5.2.1 --- Syntax --- p.63Chapter 5.2.2 --- Security Notions --- p.64Chapter 5.3 --- Constructions --- p.68Chapter 5.3.1 --- Generic Construction --- p.68Chapter 5.3.2 --- An Instantiation: IBGS-SDH --- p.69Chapter 5.4 --- Security Theorems --- p.73Chapter 5.5 --- Discussions --- p.81Chapter 5.5.1 --- Other Instantiations --- p.81Chapter 5.5.2 --- Short Ring Signatures --- p.82Chapter 5.6 --- Chapter Conclusion --- p.82Chapter 6 --- Hierarchical IBS without Random Oracles --- p.83Chapter 6.1 --- New Intractability Assumption --- p.87Chapter 6.2 --- Security Model: HIBS and HIBSC --- p.89Chapter 6.2.1 --- HIBS Security Model --- p.89Chapter 6.2.2 --- Hierarchical Identity Based Signcryption (HIBSC) --- p.92Chapter 6.3 --- Efficient Instantiation of HIBS --- p.95Chapter 6.3.1 --- Security Analysis --- p.96Chapter 6.3.2 --- Ordinary Signature from HIBS --- p.101Chapter 6.4 --- Plausibility Arguments for the Intractability of the OrcYW Assumption --- p.102Chapter 6.5 --- Efficient HIBSC without Random Oracles --- p.103Chapter 6.5.1 --- Generic Composition from HIBE and HIBS --- p.104Chapter 6.5.2 --- Concrete Instantiation --- p.105Chapter 6.6 --- Chapter Conclusion --- p.107Chapter 7 --- Conclusion --- p.108Bibliography --- p.10

Anonymous, authentic, and accountable resource management based on the E-cash paradigm

The prevalence of digital information management in an open network has driven the need to maintain balance between anonymity, authenticity and accountability (AAA). Anonymity allows a principal to hide its identity from strangers before trust relationship is established. Authenticity ensures the correct identity is engaged in the transaction even though it is hidden. Accountability uncovers the hidden identity when misbehavior of the principal is detected. The objective of this research is to develop an AAA management framework for secure resource allocations. Most existing resource management schemes are designed to manage one or two of the AAA attributes. How to provide high strength protection to all attributes is an extremely challenging undertaking. Our study shows that the electronic cash (E-cash) paradigm provides some important knowledge bases for this purpose. Based on Chaum-Pederson’s general transferable E-cash model, we propose a timed-zero-knowledge proof (TZKP) protocol, which greatly reduces storage spaces and communication overheads for resource transfers, without compromising anonymity and accountability. Based on Eng-Okamoto’s general divisible E-cash model, we propose a hypercube-based divisibility framework, which provides a sophisticated and flexible way to partition a chunk of resources, with different trade-offs in anonymity protection and computational costs, when it is integrated with different sub-cube allocation schemes. Based on the E-cash based resource management framework, we propose a privacy preserving service oriented architecture (SOA), which allows the service providers and consumers to exchange services without leaking their sensitive data. Simulation results show that the secure resource management framework is highly practical for missioncritical applications in large scale distributed information systems

On Achieving Secure Message Authentication for Vehicular Communications

Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs) have emerged as a new application scenario that is envisioned to revolutionize the human driving experiences, optimize traffic flow control systems, etc. Addressing security and privacy issues as the prerequisite of VANETs' development must be emphasized. To avoid any possible malicious attack and resource abuse, employing a digital signature scheme is widely recognized as the most effective approach for VANETs to achieve authentication, integrity, and validity. However, when the number of signatures received by a vehicle becomes large, a scalability problem emerges immediately, where a vehicle could be difficult to sequentially verify each received signature within 100-300 ms interval in accordance with the current Dedicated Short Range Communications (DSRC) protocol. In addition, there are still some unsolved attacks in VANETs such as Denial of Service (Dos) attacks, which are not well addressed and waiting for us to solve. In this thesis, we propose the following solutions to address the above mentioned security related issues. First of all, to address the scalability issues, we introduce a novel roadside unit (RSU) aided message authentication scheme, named RAISE, which makes RSUs responsible for verifying the authenticity of messages sent from vehicles and for notifying the results back to vehicles. In addition, RAISE adopts the k-anonymity property for preserving user privacy, where a message cannot be associated with a common vehicle. Secondly, we further consider the situation that RSUs may not cover all the busy streets of a city or a highway in some situations, for example, at the beginning of a VANETs' deployment period, or due to the physical damage of some RSUs, or simply for economic considerations. Under these circumstances, we further propose an efficient identity-based batch signature verification scheme for vehicular communications. The proposed scheme can make vehicles verify a batch of signatures once instead of one after another, and thus it efficiently increases vehicles' message verification speed. In addition, our scheme achieves conditional privacy: a distinct pseudo identity is generated along with each message, and a trust authority can trace a vehicle's real identity from its pseudo identity. In order to find invalid signatures in a batch of signatures, we adopt group testing technique which can find invalid signatures efficiently. Lastly, we identify a DoS attack, called signature jamming attack (SJA), which could easily happen and possibly cause a profound vicious impact on the normal operations of a VANET, yet has not been well addressed in the literature. The SJA can be simply launched at an attacker by flooding a significant number of messages with invalid signatures that jam the surrounding vehicles and prevent them from timely verifying regular and legitimate messages. To countermeasure the SJA, we introduces a hash-based puzzle scheme, which serves as a light-weight filter for excluding likely false signatures before they go through relatively lengthy signature verification process. To further minimize the vicious effect of SJA, we introduce a hash recommendation mechanism, which enables vehicles to share their information so as to more efficiently thwart the SJA. For each research solution, detailed analysis in terms of computational time, and transmission overhead, privacy preservation are performed to validate the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed schemes

Enabling Machine-aided Cryptographic Design

The design of cryptographic primitives such as digital signatures and public-key encryption is very often a manual process conducted by expert cryptographers. This persists despite the fact that many new generic or semi-generic methods have been proposed to construct new primitives by transforming existing ones in interesting ways. However, manually applying transformations to existing primitives can be error-prone, ad-hoc and tedious. A natural question is whether automating the process of applying cryptographic transformations would yield competitive or better results? In this thesis, we explore a compiler-based approach for automatically performing certain cryptographic designs. Similar approaches have been applied to various types of cryptographic protocol design with compelling results. We extend this same approach and show that it also can be effective towards automatically applying cryptographic transformations. We first present our extensible architecture that automates a class of cryptographic transformations on primitives. We then propose several techniques that address the aforementioned question including the Charm cryptographic framework, which enables rapid prototyping of cryptographic primitives from abstract descriptions. We build on this work and show the extent to which transformations can be performed automatically given these descriptions. To illustrate this automation, we present a series of cryptographic tools that demonstrate the effectiveness of our automated approach. Our contributions are listed as follows: - AutoBatch: Batch verification is a transformation that improves signature verification time by efficiently processing many signatures at once. Historically, this manual process has been prone to error and tedious for practitioners. We describe the design of an automated tool that finds efficient batch verification algorithms from abstract descriptions of signature schemes. - AutoGroup: Cryptographers often prefer to describe their pairing-based constructions using symmetric group notation for simplicity, while they prefer asymmetric groups for implementation due to the efficiency gains. The symmetric- to-asymmetric translation is usually performed through manual analysis of a scheme and finding an efficient translation that suits applications can be quite challenging. We present an automated tool that uses SMT solvers to find efficient asymmetric translations from abstract descriptions of cryptographic schemes. - AutoStrong: Strongly unforgeable signatures are desired in practice for a variety of cryptographic protocols. Several transformations exist in the literature that show how to obtain strongly unforgeable signatures from existentially unforgeable ones. We focus on a particular highly-efficient transformation due to Boneh, Shen and Waters that is applicable if the signature satisfies a notion of partitioning. Checking for this property can be challenging and has been less explored in the literature. We present an automated tool that also utilizes SMT solvers to determine when this property is applicable for constructing efficient strongly unforgeable signatures from abstract descriptions. We anticipate that these proof-of-concept tools embody the notion that certain cryptographic transformations can be safely and effectively outsourced to machines