Efficient certificate-based signcryption secure against public key replacement attacks and insider attacks.

Abstract

Signcryption is a useful cryptographic primitive that achieves confidentiality and authentication in an efficient manner. As an extension of signcryption in certificate-based cryptography, certificate-based signcryption preserves the merits of certificate-based cryptography and signcryption simultaneously. In this paper, we present an improved security model of certificate-based signcryption that covers both public key replacement attack and insider security. We show that an existing certificate-based signcryption scheme is insecure in our model. We also propose a new certificate-based signcryption scheme that achieves security against both public key replacement attacks and insider attacks. We prove in the random oracle model that the proposed scheme is chosen-ciphertext secure and existentially unforgeable. Performance analysis shows that the proposed scheme outperforms all the previous certificate-based signcryption schemes in the literature.