Signcryption schemes with threshold unsigncryption, and applications

The final publication is available at link.springer.comThe goal of a signcryption scheme is to achieve the same functionalities as encryption and signature together, but in a more efficient way than encrypting and signing separately. To increase security and reliability in some applications, the unsigncryption phase can be distributed among a group of users, through a (t, n)-threshold process. In this work we consider this task of threshold unsigncryption, which has received very few attention from the cryptographic literature up to now (maybe surprisingly, due to its potential applications). First we describe in detail the security requirements that a scheme for such a task should satisfy: existential unforgeability and indistinguishability, under insider chosen message/ciphertext attacks, in a multi-user setting. Then we show that generic constructions of signcryption schemes (by combining encryption and signature schemes) do not offer this level of security in the scenario of threshold unsigncryption. For this reason, we propose two new protocols for threshold unsigncryption, which we prove to be secure, one in the random oracle model and one in the standard model. The two proposed schemes enjoy an additional property that can be very useful. Namely, the unsigncryption protocol can be divided in two phases: a first one where the authenticity of the ciphertext is verified, maybe by a single party; and a second one where the ciphertext is decrypted by a subset of t receivers, without using the identity of the sender. As a consequence, the schemes can be used in applications requiring some level of anonymity, such as electronic auctions.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

On the Security of ID Based Signcryption Schemes

A signcryption scheme is secure only if it satisfies both the confidentiality and the unforgeability properties. All the ID based signcryption schemes presented in the standard model till now do not have either the confidentiality or the unforgeability or both of these properties. Cryptanalysis of some of the schemes have been proposed already. In this work, we present the security attacks on `Secure ID based signcryption in the standard model\u27 proposed by Li-Takagi and `Further improvement of an identity-based signcryption scheme in the standard model\u27 by Li et al. and the flaws in the proof of security of `Efficient ID based signcryption in the standard model\u27 proposed by Li et al., which are the recently proposed ID based signcryption schemes in the standard model. We also present the cryptanalysis of `Construction of identity based signcryption schemes\u27 proposed by Pandey-Barua and the cryptanalysis of `Identity-Based Signcryption from Identity-Based Cryptography\u27 proposed by Lee-Seo-Lee. These schemes present the methods of constructing an ID based signcryption scheme in the random oracle model from an ID based signature scheme and an ID based encryption scheme. Since none of the existing schemes in the standard model are found to be provably secure, we analyse the security of signcryption schemes got by directly combining an ID based signature scheme and an ID based encryption scheme in the standard model

SIGNCRYPTION ANALYZE

The aim of this paper is to provide an overview for the research that has been done so far in signcryption area. The paper also presents the extensions for the signcryption scheme and discusses the security in signcryption. The main contribution to this paper represents the implementation of the signcryption algorithm with the examples provided.ElGamal, elliptic curves, encryption, identity-based, proxy-signcryption, public key, ring-signcryption, RSA, signcryption

LPKI - A Lightweight Public Key Infrastructure for the Mobile Environments

The non-repudiation as an essential requirement of many applications can be provided by the asymmetric key model. With the evolution of new applications such as mobile commerce, it is essential to provide secure and efficient solutions for the mobile environments. The traditional public key cryptography involves huge computational costs and is not so suitable for the resource-constrained platforms. The elliptic curve-based approaches as the newer solutions require certain considerations that are not taken into account in the traditional public key infrastructures. The main contribution of this paper is to introduce a Lightweight Public Key Infrastructure (LPKI) for the constrained platforms such as mobile phones. It takes advantages of elliptic curve cryptography and signcryption to decrease the computational costs and communication overheads, and adapting to the constraints. All the computational costs of required validations can be eliminated from end-entities by introduction of a validation authority to the introduced infrastructure and delegating validations to such a component. LPKI is so suitable for mobile environments and for applications such as mobile commerce where the security is the great concern.Comment: 6 Pages, 6 Figure

S-Mbank: Secure Mobile Banking Authentication Scheme Using Signcryption, Pair Based Text Authentication, and Contactless Smartcard

Nowadays, mobile banking becomes a popular tool which consumers can conduct financial transactions such as shopping, monitoring accounts balance, transferring funds and other payments. Consumers dependency on mobile needs, make people take a little bit more interest in mobile banking. The use of the one-time password which is sent to the user mobile phone by short message service (SMS) is a vulnerability which we want to solve with proposing a new scheme called S-Mbank. We replace the authentication using the one-time password with the contactless smart card to prevent attackers to use the unencrypted message which is sent to the user's mobile phone. Moreover, it deals vulnerability of spoofer to send an SMS pretending as a bank's server. The contactless smart card is proposed because of its flexibility and security which easier to bring in our wallet than the common passcode generators. The replacement of SMS-based authentication with contactless smart card removes the vulnerability of unauthorized users to act as a legitimate user to exploit the mobile banking user's account. Besides that, we use public-private key pair and PIN to provide two factors authentication and mutual authentication. We use signcryption scheme to provide the efficiency of the computation. Pair based text authentication is also proposed for the login process as a solution to shoulder-surfing attack. We use Scyther tool to analyze the security of authentication protocol in S-Mbank scheme. From the proposed scheme, we are able to provide more security protection for mobile banking service.Comment: 6 page

Efficient Authenticated Encryption Schemes with Public Verifiability

An authenticated encryption scheme allows messages to be encrypted and authenticated simultaneously. In 2003, Ma and Chen proposed such a scheme with public verifiability. That is, in their scheme the receiver can efficiently prove to a third party that a message is indeed originated from a specific sender. In this paper, we first identify two security weaknesses in the Ma-Chen authenticated encryption scheme. Then, based on the Schnorr signature, we proposed an efficient and secure improved scheme such that all the desired security requirements are satisfied.Comment: Early version appears in the Proc. of The 60th IEEE Vehicular Technology Conference (VTC 2004-Fall) - Wireless Technologies for Global Security. IEEE, 200

Certificateless KEM and Hybrid Signcryption Schemes Revisited

Often authentication and confidentiality are required as simultaneous key requirements in many cryptographic applications. The cryptographic primitive called signcryption effectively implements the same and while most of the public key based systems are appropriate for small messages, hybrid encryption (KEM-DEM) provides an efficient and practical way to securely communicate very large messages. Recently, Lippold et al. \cite{GCJ09} proposed a certificateless KEM in the standard model and the first certificateless hybrid signcryption scheme was proposed by Fagen Li et al. \cite{LST09}. The concept of certificateless hybrid signcryption has evolved by combining the ideas of signcryption based on tag-KEM and certificateless cryptography. In this paper, we show that \cite{GCJ09} is not Type-I CCA secure and \cite{LST09} is existentially forgeable. We also propose an improved certificateless hybrid signcryption scheme and formally prove the security of the improved scheme against both adaptive chosen ciphertext attack and existential forgery in the appropriate security models for certificateless hybrid signcryption