Certificateless cryptography involves a Key Generation Center (KGC) which issues a partial key to a user and the user also independently generates an additional public/secret key pair in such a way that the KGC who knows only the partial key but not the additional secret key is not able to do any cryptographic operation on behalf of the user; and a third party who replaces the public/secret key pair but does not know the partial key cannot do any cryptographic operation as the user either. We call this attack launched by the third party as the key replacement attack. In ACISP 2004, Yum and Lee proposed a generic construction of digital signature schemes under the framework of certificateless cryptography. In this paper, we show that their generic construction is insecure against key replacement attack. In particular, we show that the security requirements of their generic building blocks are insufficient to support some security claim stated in their paper. We then propose a modification of their scheme and show its security in a new and simplified security model. We show that our simplified definition and adversarial model not only capture all the distinct features of certificateless signature but are also more versatile when compared with all the comparable ones. We believe that the model itself is of independent interest.

Key replacement attack against a generic construction of certificateless signature

For the last two decades the notion and implementations of proxy signatures have been used to allow transfer of digital signing power within some context (in order to enable flexibility of signers within organizations and among entities). On the other hand, various notions of the key-evolving signature paradigms (forward-secure, key-insulated, and intrusion-resilient signatures) have been suggested in the last few years for protecting the security of signature schemes, localizing the damage of secret key exposure. In this work we relate the various notions via direct and concrete security reductions that are tight. We start by developing the first formal model for fully hierarchical proxy signatures, which, as we point out, also addresses vulnerabilities of previous schemes when self-delegation is used. Next, we prove that proxy signatures are, in fact, equivalent to key-insulated signatures. We then use this fact and other results to establish a tight hierarchy among the key-evolving notions, showing that intrusion-resilient signatures and key-insulated signatures are equivalent, and imply forward-secure signatures. We also introduce other relations among extended notions. Besides the importance of understanding the relationships among the various notions that were originally designed with different goals or with different system configuration in mind, our findings imply new designs of schemes. For example, many proxy signatures have been presented without formal model and proofs, whereas using our results we can employ the work on key-insulated schemes to suggest new provably secure designs of proxy signatures schemes.

The hierarchy of key evolving signatures and a characterization of proxy signatures

Certificateless Threshold Ring Signature

Delegation of signing rights using certificateless proxy signatures

Cloud auditing is one of the important processes to ensure the security and integrity of data in cloud storage. Implementing cloud auditing requires various cryptographic tools such as identity-based cryptography and its variant: certificateless cryptography which solves the inherent key escrow problem in identity-based cryptography. Applying certificateless cryptography to cloud auditing has shown many merits. However, in a multi-user setting, certificateless cloud auditing (CLCA) schemes require additional security requirements. For instance, the identity privacy becomes an important issue that should be taken into consideration in some applications. In this paper, we concentrate on the identity privacy of CLCA schemes. We define the security models of privacy-preserving CLCA schemes, namely the uncheatability and anonymity and propose an efficient CLCA scheme, which is secure in the security models. As a feature of our scheme, the tag of a message is compact, which consists of only one group element. The uncheatability is based on variants of bilinear Diffie–Hellman assumption in the random oracle model. The identity privacy of the user is information-theoretically guaranteed against the third party auditor.

Privacy-Preserving Certificateless Cloud Auditing with Multiple Users

Ring signature is a kind of group-oriented signature. It allows a member of a group to sign messages on behalf of the group without revealing his/her identity. Certificateless public key cryptography was first introduced by Al-Riyami and Paterson in Asiacrypt 2003. In certificateless cryptography, it does not require the use of certificates to guarantee the authenticity of users' public keys. Meanwhile, certificateless cryptography does not have the key escrow problem, which seems to be inherent in the Identity-based cryptography. In this paper, we introduce the notion of ring signature into certificateless public key cryptography and propose a concrete certificateless ring signature scheme. The security models of certificateless ring signature are also formalized. Our new scheme is provably secure in the random oracle model, with the assumption that the Computational Diffie-Hellman problem is hard.

A provably secure ring signature scheme in certificateless cryptography

Ring signature is a kind of group-oriented signature. It allows a member of a group to sign messages on behalf of the group without revealing his/her identity. Certificateless public key cryptography was first introduced by Al-Riyami and Paterson in Asiacrypt 2003. In certificateless cryptography, it does not require the use of certificates to guarantee the authenticity of users' public keys. Meanwhile, certificateless cryptography does not have the key escrow problem, which seems to be inherent in the Identity-based cryptography. In this paper, we propose a concrete certificateless ring signature scheme. The security models of certificateless ring signature are also formalized. Our new scheme is provably secure in the random oracle model, with the assumption that the Computational Diffie-Hellman problem is hard. In addition, we also show that a generic construction of certificateless ring signature is insecure against the key replacement attack defined in our security models.

Wei Wu

Papers

A provably secure ring signature scheme in certificateless cryptography

A Provably Secure Ring Signature Scheme in Certificateless Cryptography