Certificateless aggregate deniable authentication protocol for ad hoc networks

Abstract

Deniable authentication allows a receiver to identify the source of a given message, but cannot prove the source of a given message to any third party. It can be employed in electronic voting (e-voting) systems, electronic tendering (e-tendering) systems and secure networks negotiation. These applications can be well realised in ad hoc networks. Therefore, deniable authentication is an essential security requirement for ad hoc networks. Aggregate deniable authentication is a method for combining n authenticator of n distinct messages from n distinct users into one single authenticator. This feature is very attractive in bandwidth-limited ad hoc networks. In this paper, we present an efficient certificateless aggregate deniable authentication protocol. Our protocol is based on certificateless public key cryptography that has neither the public key certificates management problem in traditional public key infrastructure (PKI) cryptography nor the key escrow problem in identity-based cryptography. The security of our protocol can be proven in the random oracle model under the bilinear Diffie-Hellman (BDH) and computational Diffie-Hellman (CDH) problems. In addition, our protocol adopts aggregate verification that can speed up the verification of authenticators. Our protocol is very suitable for ad hoc networks.