61 research outputs found
Cryptographic Schemes based on Elliptic Curve Pairings
This thesis introduces the concept of certificateless public key
cryptography (CLPKC). Elliptic curve pairings are then used to
make concrete CL-PKC schemes and are also used to make other
efficient key agreement protocols.
CL-PKC can be viewed as a model for the use of public key cryptography
that is intermediate between traditional certificated PKC and ID-PKC.
This is because, in contrast to traditional public key cryptographic
systems, CL-PKC does not require the use of certificates to guarantee
the authenticity of public keys. It does rely on the use of a trusted
authority (TA) who is in possession of a master key. In this
respect, CL-PKC is similar to identity-based public key
cryptography (ID-PKC). On the other hand, CL-PKC does not suffer
from the key escrow property that is inherent in ID-PKC.
Applications for the new infrastructure are discussed.
We exemplify how CL-PKC schemes can be constructed by constructing
several certificateless public key encryption schemes and
modifying other existing ID based schemes. The lack of
certificates and the desire to prove the schemes secure in the
presence of an adversary who has access to the master key or has
the ability to replace public keys, requires the careful
development of new security models. We prove that some of our
schemes are secure, provided that the Bilinear Diffie-Hellman
Problem is hard.
We then examine Joux’s protocol, which is a one round, tripartite
key agreement protocol that is more bandwidth-efficient than any
previous three-party key agreement protocol, however, Joux’s protocol
is insecure, suffering from a simple man-in-the-middle attack. We
show how to make Joux’s protocol secure, presenting several tripartite,
authenticated key agreement protocols that still require only one round
of communication. The security properties of the new protocols are
studied. Applications for the protocols are also discussed
Certificateless Algorithm for Body Sensor Network and Remote Medical Server Units Authentication over Public Wireless Channels
Wireless sensor networks process and exchange mission-critical data relating to patients’ health status. Obviously, any leakages of the sensed data can have serious consequences which can endanger the lives of patients. As such, there is need for strong security and privacy protection of the data in storage as well as the data in transit. Over the recent past, researchers have developed numerous security protocols based on digital signatures, advanced encryption standard, digital certificates and elliptic curve cryptography among other approaches. However, previous studies have shown the existence of many security and privacy gaps that can be exploited by attackers to cause some harm in these networks. In addition, some techniques such as digital certificates have high storage and computation complexities occasioned by certificate and public key management issues. In this paper, a certificateless algorithm is developed for authenticating the body sensors and remote medical server units. Security analysis has shown that it offers data privacy, secure session key agreement, untraceability and anonymity. It can also withstand typical wireless sensor networks attacks such as impersonation, packet replay and man-in-the-middle. On the other hand, it is demonstrated to have the least execution time and bandwidth requirements
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
Pairing-based cryptosystems and key agreement protocols.
For a long time, pairings on elliptic curves have been considered to be destructive in elliptic curve cryptography. Only recently after some pioneering works, particularly the well-known Boneh-Franklin identity-based encryption (IBE), pairings have quickly become an important
tool to construct novel cryptographic schemes.
In this thesis, several new cryptographic schemes with pairings are proposed, which are both efficient and secure with respect to a properly defined security model, and some
relevant previous schemes are revisited.
IBE provides a public key encryption mechanism where a public key can be an arbitrary string such as an entity identifier and unwieldy certificates are unnecessary. Based on the Sakai-Kasahara key construction, an IBE scheme which is secure in the Boneh-Franklin IBE model is constructed, and two identity-based key encapsulation mechanisms are proposed. These schemes achieve the best efficiency among the existing schemes to date. Recently Al-Riyami and Paterson introduced the certificateless public key encryption (CL-PKE) paradigm, which eliminates the need of certificates and at the same time retains the desirable properties of IBE without the key escrow problem. The security formulation of CL-PKE is revisited and a strong security model for this type of mechanism is defined.
Following a heuristic approach, three efficient CL-PKE schemes which are secure in the defined strong security model are proposed. Identity-based two-party key agreement protocols from pairings are also investigated.
The Bellare-Rogaway key agreement model is enhanced and within the model several previously unproven protocols in the literature are formally analysed. In considering that the user identity may be sensitive information in many environments, an identity-based key agreement protocol with unilateral identity privacy is proposed
A Certificateless One-Way Group Key Agreement Protocol for Point-to-Point Email Encryption
Over the years, email has evolved and grown to one of the most widely used form of communication between individuals and organizations. Nonetheless, the current information technology standards do not value the significance of email security in today\u27s technologically advanced world. Not until recently, email services such as Yahoo and Google started to encrypt emails for privacy protection. Despite that, the encrypted emails will be decrypted and stored in the email service provider\u27s servers as backup. If the server is hacked or compromised, it can lead to leakage and modification of one\u27s email. Therefore, there is a strong need for point-to-point (P2P) email encryption to protect email user\u27s privacy. P2P email encryption schemes strongly rely on the underlying Public Key Cryptosystems (PKC). The evolution of the public key cryptography from the traditional PKC to the Identity-based PKC (ID-PKC) and then to the Certificateless PKC (CL-PKC) provides a better and more suitable cryptosystem to implement P2P email encryption. Many current public-key based cryptographic protocols either suffer from the expensive public-key certificate infrastructure (in traditional PKC) or the key escrow problem (in ID-PKC). CL-PKC is a relatively new cryptosystem that was designed to overcome both problems. In this thesis, we present a CL-PKC group key agreement protocol, which is, as the author\u27s knowledge, the first one with all the following features in one protocol: (1) certificateless and thus there is no key escrow problem and no public key certificate infrastructure is required. (2) one-way group key agreement and thus no back-and-forth message exchange is required; (3) n-party group key agreement (not just 2- or 3-party); and (4) no secret channel is required for key distribution. With the above features, P2P email encryption can be implemented securely and efficiently. This thesis provides a security proof for the proposed protocol using ``proof by simulation\u27\u27. Efficiency analysis of the protocol is also presented in this thesis. In addition, we have implemented the prototypes (email encryption systems) in two different scenarios in this thesis
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