Self-generated-certificate public key encryption without pairing and its application

Abstract

Recently, Liu et al. [26] discovered that Certificateless Public Key Encryption (CL-PKE) suffers the Denial-of-Decryption (DoD) attack. Based on CL-PKC, the authors introduced a new paradigm called Self-Generated-Certificate Public Key Cryptography (SGC-PKC) that captured the DoD attack and proposed the first scheme derived from a novel application of Water’s Identity-Based Encryption scheme [43]. In this paper, we propose a new SGC-PKE scheme that does not depend on the bilinear pairings and hence, is more efficient and requires shorter public keys than Liu et al.’s scheme. More importantly, our scheme reaches Girault’s trust level 3 [16] (cf. Girault’s trust level 2 of Liu and Au’s scheme), the same trust level achieved by a traditional PKI. In addition, we also discuss how our scheme can lead to a secure and self-organized key management and authentication system for ad hoc wireless networks with a function of user-controlled key renewal.