Further Observations on Certificate-Base Encryption and its Generic Construction from Certificateless Public Key Encryption

Certificate-based encryption (CBE) is a new asymmetric encryption paradigm which was introduced to solve the certificate management problem in traditional public key encryption (PKI). It combines PKE and identity-based encryption (IBE) while preserving some of their most attractive features. CBE provides an efficient implicit certificate mechanism which eliminates the third-party queries and simplifies the certificate revocation problem in the traditional PKI. It also solves the key escrow problem and key distribution problem inherent in IBE. In this paper, we introduce the key replacement attack and the malicious-but-passive certifier attack into CBE, and define a class of new security models for CBE under different security levels according to the power of the adversaries against CBE. Our new security models are more elaborated and stronger compared with other existing ones. Then, we propose a generic construction of CBE from certificateless public key encryption and prove its security under the proposed security models in the standard model. We also show a concrete conversion using the proposed generic construction

Deep Attacks of a Certificateless Signature Scheme

Certificateless public key cryptography is an attractive paradigm since it eliminates the use of certificates in traditional public key cryptography and alleviates the inherent key escrow problem in identity-based cryptography. Recently, Xiong et al. proposed a certificateless signature scheme and proved that their scheme is existentially unforgeable against adaptive chosen message attack under the random oracle model. He et al. pointed out that Xiong et al.’s scheme is insecure against the Type II adversary. But, their forged signatures are not random, and their improved scheme has the same security defects as Xiong et al.’s scheme. In this paper, we present two malicious-but-passive KGC attack methods on Xiong et al.’s scheme and our results show that their scheme is insecure against malicious-but-passive KGC attack

Black-Box Constructions of Signature Schemes in the Bounded Leakage Setting

To simplify the certificate management procedures, Shamir introduced the concept of identity-based cryptography (IBC). However, the key escrow problem is inherent in IBC. To get rid of it, Al-Riyami and Paterson introduced in 2003 the notion of certificateless cryptography (CLC). However, if a cryptosystem is not perfectly implemented, adversaries would be able to obtain part of the system\u27s secret state via side-channel attacks, and thus may break the system. This is not considered in the security model of traditional cryptographic primitives. Leakage-resilient cryptography was then proposed to prevent adversaries from doing so. There are fruitful works on leakage-resilient encryption schemes, while there are not many on signature schemes in the leakage setting. In this work, we review the folklore generic constructions of identity-based signature and certificateless signature, and show that if the underlying primitives are leakage-resilient, so are the resulting identity-based signature scheme and certificateless signature scheme. The leakage rate follows the minimum one of the underlying primitives. We also show some instantiations of these generic constructions

TOWARD CERTIFICATELESS SIGNCRYPTION SCHEME WITHOUT RANDOM ORACLES

Signcryption is a useful paradigm which simultaneously offers both the functions of encryption and signature in a single logic step. It would be interesting to make signcryption certificateless to ease the heavy burden of certificate management in traditional public key cryptography (PKC) and solve the key escrow problem in Identity-based public key cryptography (ID-PKC). Most certificateless signcryption (CL-SC) schemes are constructed in the random oracle model instead of the standard model. By exploiting Bellare and Shoup\u27s one-time signature, Hwang et al.\u27s certificateless encryption and Li et al.\u27s identity-based signcryption, this paper proposes a new CL-SC scheme secure in the standard model. It is proven that our CL-SC scheme satisfies semantic security and unforgeability against the outside adversary and malicious-but-passive key generation center (KGC) assuming the hardness of bilinear decision Diffie-Hellman (BDDH) and computational Diffie-Hellman (CDH) problems. Our security proofs do not depend on random oracles

Security in Key Agreement: Two-Party Certificateless Schemes

The main goal of cryptography is to enable secure communication over a public channel; often a secret shared among the communicating parties is used to achieve this. The process by which these parties agree on such a shared secret is called key agreement. In this thesis, we focus on two-party key agreement protocols in the public-key setting and study the various methods used to establish and validate public keys. We pay particular attention to certificateless key agreement schemes and attempt to formalize a relevant notion of security. To that end, we give a possible extension of the existing extended Canetti-Krawzcyk security model applicable to the certificateless setting. We observe that none of the certificateless protocols we have seen in the literature are secure in this model; it is an open question whether such schemes exist. We analyze several published certificateless key agreement protocols, demonstrating the existence of key compromise impersonation attacks and even a man-in-the-middle attack in one case, contrary to the claims of the authors. We also briefly describe weaknesses exhibited by these protocols in the context of our suggested security model

Strongly Unforgeable Certificateless Signature Resisting Attacks from Malicious-But-Passive KGC

In digital signature, strong unforgeability requires that an attacker cannot forge a new signature on any previously signed/new messages, which is attractive in both theory and practice. Recently, a strongly unforgeable certificateless signature (CLS) scheme without random oracles was presented. In this paper, we firstly show that the scheme fails to achieve strong unforgeability by forging a new signature on a previously signed message under its adversarial model. Then, we point out that the scheme is also vulnerable to the malicious-but-passive key generation center (MKGC) attacks. Finally, we propose an improved strongly unforgeable CLS scheme in the standard model. The improved scheme not only meets the requirement of strong unforgeability but also withstands the MKGC attacks. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to prove a CLS scheme to be strongly unforgeable against the MKGC attacks without using random oracles

Certificateless Proxy Signature from RSA

Although some good results were achieved in speeding up the computation of pairing function in recent years, it is still interesting to design efficient cryptosystems with less bilinear pairing operation. A proxy signature scheme allows a proxy signer to sign messages on behalf of an original signer within a given context. We propose a certificateless proxy signature (CLPS) scheme from RSA and prove its security under the strongest security model where the Type I/II adversary is a super Type I/II adversary

A survey on wireless body area networks: architecture, security challenges and research opportunities.

In the era of communication technologies, wireless healthcare networks enable innovative applications to enhance the quality of patients’ lives, provide useful monitoring tools for caregivers, and allows timely intervention. However, due to the sensitive information within the Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs), insecure data violates the patients’ privacy and may consequently lead to improper medical diagnosis and/or treatment. Achieving a high level of security and privacy in WBAN involves various challenges due to its resource limitations and critical applications. In this paper, a comprehensive survey of the WBAN technology is provided, with a particular focus on the security and privacy concerns along with their countermeasures, followed by proposed research directions and open issues

Blockchain-enhanced certificateless signature scheme in the standard model

The Internet of Things (IoT), driven by wireless communication and other technologies, is gradually entering our lives and promoting the transformation of society from "informatization" to "intelligence". Certificateless signature (CLS) eliminates the characteristic of certificate management, making it an effective method for verifying large-scale data in the IoT environment. Nevertheless, hash functions are regarded as ideal random oracles in the security proofs of most CLS schemes, which cannot guarantee the security of CLS schemes in reality. In response to this problem, Shim devised a CLS scheme without random oracles in the standard model and declared it to be provably secure. Unfortunately, in this paper, we cryptanalyze Shim's CLS scheme and demonstrate that it is not resistant to public key replacement attacks from a Type Ⅰ attacker. Furthermore, to further improve the security of the Shim CLS scheme and avoid the single-point failure of the KGC and the signature forgery initiated, we propose a blockchain-based CLS scheme without a random oracle. Finally, we evaluate the comprehensive performance, and while maintaining the computational and communication performance of the Shim scheme, we resist both Type Ⅰ and Type Ⅱ attackers, as well as signature forgery initiated against public parameters