A Pairing-Based Proxy Authenticated Encryption Scheme for Protecting Mobile Agents

Abstract

Nowadays, security is one of key issues for mobile agent technology while mobile agents are applied to the development of e-commerce. By using the proposed integrated public key cryptosystem, this paper presents a proxy authenticated encryption scheme based on a proxy signature scheme for protecting mobile agents against malicious attacks by hosts. The proposed cryptosystem is constructed using the pairing-based cryptosystems, and it also integrates the identity-based public key cryptosystems with the self-certified public key cryptosystems to provide higher security strength and meanwhile maintain a satisfactory performance. Based on the proposed cryptosystem, we first design a proxy signature scheme to protect a user's private key and keep the integrity of the contract which an agent signs. In addition, we further develop a proxy authenticated encryption scheme using the proposed proxy signature scheme such that the signatures of the contracts can not only satisfy users' constraints, but also achieve servers' non-repudiation. Furthermore, the confidentiality of the signed message is also guaranteed in the proposed scheme. Hence, the proposed schemes are able to fulfill the security requirements of confidentiality, integrity, authenticity, and non-repudiation to accomplish mobile agent security. Besides, the performance evaluation results also show the developed schemes are more efficient than other previously proposed schemes. In such a way, we affirm that the proposed schemes are very feasible for mobile agent protection.