Efficient deniable authentication and its application in location-based services

Abstract

Deniable authentication (DA) assures message authentication between sets of participants. The actual participants can be certain about the messages’ authenticity but cannot prove it to any third party after the event. In applications such as location-based service (LBS) systems, DA is inevitably relevant to assure the coercion-free state of its usage and to protect user privacy. To protect user privacy in LBS systems, we present two heterogeneous deniable authentication (HDA) schemes called HDA-I and HDA-II scheme. The HDA-I scheme permits communication sessions from certificateless cryptography (CLC) to identity-based cryptography (IBC) setting, whiles the HDA-II scheme runs in a vice versa mode. Our schemes admit security proof in random oracle model (ROM) under computational Diffie–Hellman (CDH) and bilinear Diffie–Hellman (BDH) assumptions. Furthermore, both HDA-I and HDA-II provide batch verification, that can accelerate the verification of authenticators. Lastly, via comprehensive performance evaluation, our schemes show up efficient against other recent related schemes.