On security of a certificateless signcryption scheme
Songqin Miao
a
, Futai Zhang
a,b,
⇑
, Sujuan Li
a
,YiMu
c
a
School of Computer Science and Technology, Nanjing Normal University, PR China
b
Jiangsu Engineering Research Center on Information Security and Privacy Protection Technology, Nanjing, PR China
c
Centre for Computer and Information Security Research, School of Computer Science and Software Engineering, University of Wollongong, Australia
article info
Article history:
Available online 13 December 2011
Keywords:
Certificateless cryptography
Signcryption
Confidentiality
Non-repudiation
Public key replacement attack
abstract
It would be interesting if a signcryption scheme in the standard model could be made
certificateless. One of the interesting attempts is due to Liu et al. [Z. Liu, Y. Hu, X. Zhang,
H. Ma, Certificateless signcryption scheme in the standard model, Information Sciences
180 (3) (2010) 452–464]. In this paper, we provide a cryptanalysis on this scheme by depict-
ing two kinds of subtle public key replacement attacks against it. Our analysis reveals that it
does not meet the basic requirements of confidentiality and non-repudiation.
Ó 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
1. Introduction
In traditional public key infrastructure, a trusted third party called certification authority (CA) is employed to issue cer-
tificates to bind users and their public keys. This brings issues associated with certificate management, including certificate
generation, storage, distribution and revocation, as well as the computational cost of certificate verification. To avoid the
costly certificate management problem in public key infrastructure, Shamir [17] introduced the identity-based public key
cryptography (ID-PKC). In ID-PKC, digital identities of users such as email address, phone number, etc. can be utilized as pub-
lic keys. However, a trusted third party is required to compute private keys of users. This unfortunately introduces the key
escrow problem.
Certificateless cryptography (CLC) was introduced by Al-Ryiami and Paterson [1] in order to overcome the problem of key
escrow in ID-PKC and maintain certificate freeness. In CLC, a third party called Key Generation Center (KGC) is also employed
to help users generate their private keys. However, the KGC only produces a partial private key for a user. To generate the full
private key, the user uses the partial private key and a secret value chosen by himself. As the secret value is known to the user
only, the KGC cannot compute the full private key of the user. Therefore, the key escrow problem in ID-PKC is eliminated. Due
to this distinctive feature, CLC has attracted lots of attention from the research community. Over the years, many certificate-
less cryptosystems have been proposed, including encryption schemes [1,10,24,25], signature schemes [1,11,27–30], key
agreement protocols [1,31], threshold cryptosystems [8,14,23,26], and signcryption schemes [3–5,12,13,21,22]. As the adver-
sary models in CLC are more complex, the security proofs in CLC are more challenging. We notice that some existing certif-
icateless cryptosystems have been broken [16,18–20].
Signcryption, introduced by Zheng [32], is a cryptographic primitive, which captures the functionality of public key
encryption and signature simultaneously, and is more efficient than the sign-then-encrypt method. Up to now, many secure
signcryption schemes have been proposed in traditional public key cryptosystem (e.g., [33,2]). The signcryption in ID-PKC
was first investigated by Malone-Lee [15]. Later, Boyen [6] defined the formal security model for identity-based signcryption
0020-0255/$ - see front matter Ó 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.ins.2011.11.045
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Corresponding author at: School of Computer Science and Technology, Nanjing Normal University, PR China.
E-mail addresses: miaosongqin@163.com (S. Miao), zhangfutai@njnu.edu.cn (F. Zhang), lisujuan1978@126.com (S. Li), ymu@uow.edu.au (Y. Mu).
Information Sciences 232 (2013) 475–481
Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect
Information Sciences
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/ins