Effective data sharing with forward security: Identity based ring signature using different algorithms

Abstract

Freedom of speech is one of the basic human rights. Today with the boom of technology and use of internet, the use of data sharing is correspondingly important. The number of users in the internet has increased by 700% in last fifteen years [1] [13]. Also, more than 90% of world's data on the internet which is shared, is uploaded in the last two years as of 2013 [12], and it is increasing exponentially every day. The number of users has increased, so the data and its usage. The security of data and the individual is of equal importance. This brings to the point that anonymity of the individual is to be considered as of prime importance, also as the saying goes; give a man a mask, and he will tell you the truth. There is no system in place to help with these requirements. The PKI system has a bottleneck to support such a vast number of users and their data. The identity based ring signature can be used instead to overcome this by excluding the part of certificate verification, as it makes use of identity signature, which speeds up the process. Forward security is implemented along with identity ring signature to advance the data security, which helps to eliminate the flaws of any big data sharing system where the revocation mechanism is used. This property helps when a key of a single user is compromised for a specific data, then still the past and future signatures for that user will remain valid and secure, also the other users will be unaffected. This is very important as it is very wrong to ask a huge number of users to re-authenticate their data in the time of such crisis. Therefore, to preserve data integrity, giving user anonymity, and support notion of forward security we propose two different identity based ring signature with forward security implemented by two different algorithms: HMAC, and AES, we also show the comparison of both.