This paper shows a generic and simple conversion from weak asymmetric and symmetric encryption schemes into an asymmetric encryption scheme which is secure in a very strong sense- indistinguishability against adaptive chosen-ciphertext attacks in the random oracle model. In particular, this conversion can be applied efficiently to an asymmetric encryption scheme that provides a large enough coin space and, for every message, many enough variants of the encryption, like the ElGamal encryption scheme.

Secure integration of asymmetric and symmetric encryption schemes

Due to the rapid development of wireless communication systems, authentication becomes a key security component in smart grid environments. Authentication then plays an important role in the smart grid domain by providing a variety of security services including credentials’ privacy, session-key (SK) security, and secure mutual authentication. In this paper, we analyze the security of a recent relevant work in smart grid, and it is unfortunately not able to deal with SK-security and smart meter secret credentials’ privacy under the widely accepted Canetti–Krawczyk adversary (CK-adversary) model. We then propose a new efficient provably secure authenticated key agreement scheme for smart grid. Through the rigorous formal security analysis, we show that the proposed scheme achieves the well-known security functionalities including smart meter credentials’ privacy and SK-security under the CK-adversary model. The proposed scheme reduces the computation overheads for both smart meters and service providers. Furthermore, the proposed scheme offers more security functionalities as compared to the existing related schemes.

Provably Secure Authenticated Key Agreement Scheme for Smart Grid

We construct two efficient Identity-Based Encryption (IBE) systems that admit selective-identity security reductions without random oracles in groups equipped with a bilinear map. Selective-identity secure IBE is a slightly weaker security model than the standard security model for IBE. In this model the adversary must commit ahead of time to the identity that it intends to attack, whereas in an adaptive-identity attack the adversary is allowed to choose this identity adaptively. Our first system—BB1—is based on the well studied decisional bilinear Diffie–Hellman assumption, and extends naturally to systems with hierarchical identities, or HIBE. Our second system—BB2—is based on a stronger assumption which we call the Bilinear Diffie–Hellman Inversion assumption and provides another approach to building IBE systems.

Our first system, BB1, is very versatile and well suited for practical applications: the basic hierarchical construction can be efficiently secured against chosen-ciphertext attacks, and further extended to support efficient non-interactive threshold decryption, among others, all without using random oracles. Both systems, BB1 and BB2, can be modified generically to provide “full” IBE security (i.e., against adaptive-identity attacks), either using random oracles, or in the standard model at the expense of a non-polynomial but easy-to-compensate security reduction.

Efficient selective identity-based encryption without random oracles

To ensure the security and privacy of the patient’s health status in the wireless body area networks (WBANs), it is critical to secure the extra-body communication between the smart portable device held by the WBAN client and the application providers, such as the hospital, physician or medical staff. Based on certificateless cryptography, this paper proposes a remote authentication protocol featured with nonrepudiation, client anonymity, key escrow resistance, and revocability for extra-body communication in the WBANs. First, we present a certificateless encryption scheme and a certificateless signature scheme with efficient revocation against short-term key exposure, which we believe are of independent interest. Then, a certificateless anonymous remote authentication with revocation is constructed by incorporating the proposed encryption scheme and signature scheme. Our revocation mechanism is highly scalable, which is especially suitable for the large-scale WBANs, in the sense that the key-update overhead on the side of trusted party increased logarithmically in the number of users. As far as we know, this is the first time considering the revocation functionality of anonymous remote authentication for the WBANs. Both theoretic analysis and experimental simulations show that the proposed authentication protocol is provably secure in the random oracle model and highly practical.

Revocable and Scalable Certificateless Remote Authentication Protocol With Anonymity for Wireless Body Area Networks

Rapid advances in wireless communication technologies have paved the way for a wide range of mobile devices to become increasingly ubiquitous and popular. Mobile devices enable anytime, anywhere access to the Internet. The fast growth of many types of mobile services used by various users has made the traditional single-server architecture inefficient in terms of its functional requirements. To ensure the availability of various mobile services, there is a need to deploy multi-server architectures. To ensure the security of various mobile service applications, the anonymous mobile user authentication (AMUA) protocol without online registration using the self-certified public key cryptography (SCPKC) for multi-server architectures was proposed in the past. However, most of the past AMUA solutions suffer from malicious attacks or have unacceptable computation and communication costs. To address these drawbacks, we propose a new AMUA protocol that uses the SCPKC for multi-server architectures. In contrast to the existing AMUA protocols, our proposed AMUA protocol incurs lower computation and communication costs. By comparing with two of the latest AMUA protocols, the computation and the communication costs of our protocol are at least 74.93% and 37.43% lower than them, respectively. Moreover, the security analysis of our AMUA protocol demonstrates that it satisfies the security requirements in practical applications and is provably secure in the novel security model. By maintaining security at various levels, our AMUA protocol is more practical for various mobile applications.

Efficient and Anonymous Mobile User Authentication Protocol Using Self-Certified Public Key Cryptography for Multi-Server Architectures

Over the last few years, identity (ID)-based encryption (IBE) without requiring certificate management offers a practical alternative to public key encryption. However, how to revoke misbehaving/compromised identities in ID-based public key setting becomes a new and critical issue. In the past, there was little work on studying this revocation problem. In 2008, Boldyreva et al. proposed a revocable IBE (RIBE) and its associated revocation solution that used a binary tree structure to reduce the authority's periodic workload in Boneh and Franklin's IBE. However, Boldyreva et al.'s RIBE raised enormous computation costs for encryption and decryption procedures. Both IBEs require a secure channel between each user and the authority to transmit user's periodic private keys, thus the authority and each user need to encrypt and decrypt the private keys for each period. In this article, we present an efficient RIBE with a public channel, which provides a practical alternative to the previously proposed revocation solutions, while it remains efficient for encryption and decryption. Under the bilinear Diffie–Hellman assumption, we demonstrate that our RIBE with a public channel is semantically secure against adaptive chosen plaintext attacks and adaptive chosen ciphertext attacks.

Efficient Revocable ID-Based Encryption with a Public Channel

A multiserver architecture consisting of multiple servers provides resources and services for clients by way of open channels. Thus, a cryptographic protocol should be offered to ensure the legitimacy of both clients and servers, and to provide communication confidentiality. In the past, a large number of ID-based mutual authentication and key agreement (ID-MAKA) protocols have been proposed regarding this issue. Several circumstances require a revocation mechanism to revoke misbehaving/compromised clients and servers before their intended expiration dates. To do so, the existing ID-MAKA protocols generally adopt a black/white list to revoke/permit clients for access authorization. So far, no work addresses the revocation problem on servers in the sense that clients should be notified to avoid malicious services or applications provided by revoked servers. In this letter, we propose the first list-free ID-MAKA protocol with an efficient revocation mechanism for multiserver architectures. Compared with previously proposed protocols, our protocol possesses three main merits. First, it provides a simple revocation mechanism to solve the management problem of both compromised clients and servers. Second, neither clients nor servers need to keep any black/white list. Finally, it is well suitable for mobile clients by performance analysis and experimental data.

List-Free ID-Based Mutual Authentication and Key Agreement Protocol for Multiserver Architectures

A revocable ID-based authenticated group key exchange protocol with resistant to malicious participants

Public key encryption with keyword search (PEKS) is a mechanism that allows one to extract e-mails containing a particular keyword by providing a trapdoor corresponding to the keyword. And parties without the trapdoor are unable to learn any information about the extracted e-mails. Meanwhile, a PEKS scheme is also suitable to provide a secure storage system in cloud computing environment. However, in a PEKS scheme, a secure channel must be established to transmit trapdoors. A PEKS scheme with a designated server, termed dPEKS, removes the requirement of the secure channel while retaining the same functionality of PEKS. Up to date, the related studies on dPEKS are all based on the pairing-based public key system. No work focuses on dPEKS based on ID-based systems, termed dIBEKS. In this article, we propose the first dIBEKS scheme that possesses the advantage (removing certificate management) of ID-based systems. Security analysis is given to demonstrate that our scheme is provably secure and can resist off-line keyword guessing attacks. When compared with previously proposed dPEKS schemes, our scheme has better performance in terms of computational time.

Efficient searchable ID-based encryption with a designated server

The concept of a certificateless public-key system (CL-PKS) was first introduced by Al-Riyami and Paterson. The CL-PKS not only solves the key escrow problem but also retains the merit of eliminating the required certificates in the identity-based PKS. Up to now, there was little work on studying the revocation problem in existing CL-PKS constructions. In this paper, we address the revocation problem and propose the first revocable certificateless public-key encryption (RCL-PKE). We define the new syntax and security notions of the RCL-PKE and propose a concrete RCL-PKE scheme. Compared with the previously proposed CL-PKE schemes, the proposed RCL-PKE scheme retains efficiency for encryption and decryption procedures while providing an efficient revocation alternative using a public channel. Under the computational and the bilinear Diffie–Hellman assumptions, we demonstrate that our RCL-PKE scheme is semantically secure against adaptive chosen-ciphertext attacks.

Tung-Tso Tsai

Papers

Efficient Revocable ID-Based Encryption with a Public Channel

List-Free ID-Based Mutual Authentication and Key Agreement Protocol for Multiserver Architectures

A revocable ID-based authenticated group key exchange protocol with resistant to malicious participants

Efficient searchable ID-based encryption with a designated server

Revocable Certificateless Public Key Encryption