Attribute-based Signature Scheme Research Articles

Efficient attribute-based strong designated verifier signature scheme based on elliptic curve cryptography.

In an attribute-based strong designated verifier signature, a signer who satisfies the access structure signs the message and assigns it to a verifier who satisfies the access structure to verify it, which enables fine-grained access control for signers and verifiers. Such signatures are used in scenarios where the identity of the signer needs to be protected, or where the public verifiability of the signature is avoided and only the designated recipient can verify the validity of the signature. To address the problem that the overall overhead of the traditional attribute-based strong designated verifier signature scheme is relatively large, an efficient attribute-based strong designated verifier signature scheme based on elliptic curve cryptography is proposed, as well as a security analysis of the new scheme given in the standard model under the difficulty of the elliptic curve discrete logarithm problem (ECDLP). On the one hand, the proposed scheme is based on elliptic curve cryptography and uses scalar multiplication on elliptic curves, which is computationally lighter, instead of bilinear pairing, which has a higher computational overhead in traditional attribute-based signature schemes. This reduces the computational overhead of signing and verification in the system, improves the efficiency of the system, and makes the scheme more suitable for resource-constrained cloud end-user scenarios. On the other hand, the proposed scheme uses LSSS (Linear Secret Sharing Schemes) access structure with stronger access policy expression, which is more efficient than the "And" gate or access tree access structure, making the computational efficiency of the proposed scheme meet the needs of resource-constrained cloud end-users.

A study on the traceable attribute-based signature scheme provided with anonymous credentials

In order to provide the reliability of transmitted data in the era of big data, it is necessary to communicate by applying signature technology to data. There are various signature schemes, among which attribute-based signatures perform signatures based on user attributes. This ensures signer anonymity by allowing users to create and verify signatures without exposing the signer's sensitive information. However, the verifier can verify normally if the attribute period expires and a user without signing authority creates and transmits a signature with the existing signing key and attributes. In addition, signers who abuse anonymity can disclose their signing keys and attributes for some purpose (Money, profit) because there is no risk of being caught. Unauthorized users can use public information to sign and send messages. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a Traceable Attribute-based Signature scheme provided with anonymous credentials. The proposed scheme has the feature of verifying the validity of the signer by using the pseudonym ID included in the user list in the cloud server. In addition, the signer's identity is expressed as an Oblivious Transfer-based pseudonym ID. The signer's identity can be verified through tracing in case of a problem.

A novel lightweight decentralized attribute-based signature scheme for social co-governance

Social co-governance is an effective way to solve public safety incidents such as COVID-19 incident. But the insiders wouldn’t share the firsthand information for fear of cyber-violence. Though most of researches paid attention to the data access control and security, less attention focused on the identity privacy. So, in this work, it constructed a lightweight decentralized attribute-based signature scheme with unconditional full anonymity (LDABS-UFA) scheme to protect user’s identity privacy security. It confuses the user’s private key with fuzzy factors, and prevents user’s privacy in the signature from being disclosed. It outsources some complex computing to cloud servers to reduce the user device performance overhead. The security analysis result shows that the scheme is UFA security, unforgeability and non-collusion. Besides, a social co-governance system based on lightweight blackbox-based traceable decentralized attribute-based signature (LWBT-DABS) scheme is proposed. By generating fingerprints for the data owner in the signature, regulators can monitor the entire system and prevent malicious user from spreading rumors. And it constructs an accountability mechanism to prevent the abuse of supervisory power. The performance analysis shows that the data signature of our scheme size is constant, and the scheme is feasibility and practicability.

TFS-ABS: Traceable and Forward-Secure Attribute-Based Signature Scheme With Constant-Size

Attribute-based signature (ABS) is a versatile and useful cryptogrammic technology. In an ABS scheme, every signer is distributed a signing secret key in term of her/his attributes, and endorses a message in relation to some signing policy fulfilled by the signer's attributes. The verifier checks that the signature is indeed endorsed by the signer whose attributes match with the signing policy. However, existing ABS schemes suffer from the issue of abusing signature and key exposure. To address the above issues, we provide a traceable and forward-secure attribute-based signature (TFS-ABS) scheme with constant-size supporting flexible threshold predicates. Furthermore, we prove that the presented TFS-ABS scheme is existential unforgeability against selective predicate attack under the standard model. We reduce the security for the provided scheme to <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$q$</tex-math></inline-formula> -Diffie-Hellman exponentiation assumption. The designed scheme can be used to alleviate the damage induced by key exposure and traces the real identity of signer by attribute authority (AA) when the signer occurs abusing behavior. Furthermore, the signature size in presented scheme keeps constant and is independent of the number of attributes. Experimental evaluations exhibit that the presented TFS-ABS scheme is efficient in term of the communication and computation overhead.

Distributed Attribute-Based Signature With Attribute Dynamic Update for Smart Grid

Smart grid is gaining more and more attention as one of the typical applications of Internet of Things. However, in a distributed environment, how to guarantee the privacy of users in electricity trading while ensuring the efficiency of the transactions is one of the urgent issues to be solved. In this paper, we propose an attribute-based signature (DABS) scheme for distributed electricity trading, which can support users' free choice of trade objects without revealing their real identities. We construct a signature generation and verification method by taking advantage of the open and hard-to-tamper properties of blockchain to achieve signature verifiability independent of dynamic changes in attributes. To improve the update efficiency, we propose an improved scheme that enables the update complexity to be reduced from <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$O(n)$</tex-math></inline-formula> to <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$O(\log n)$</tex-math></inline-formula> , where <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$n$</tex-math></inline-formula> is the number of users. Finally, performance analysis and simulation experiments demonstrate the security and practicality of DABS.

Efficient and Flexible Multiauthority Attribute-Based Authentication for IoT Devices

The correctness and reliability of data sources are the keys to the practicality of data collected by IoT devices. Attribute-based signature(ABS) is a cryptographic primitive for users to sign with their own attributes, which can be applied to the authentication process in IoT scenarios. The attribute authority is responsible for issuing the attribute key to the user in ABS. Multiple authorities can complete attribute management tasks to avoid the threat of a single authority. However, attribute authorities need to execute multiple interactions to collaborate to generate attribute keys for users, which brings a large transmission burden. In addition, a lot of resource-constrained terminals in the IoT mostly play the role of signer or verifier in authentication protocols. The signature generation and verification algorithms often have heavy pairing and exponentiation operations. Currently, no ABS scheme takes into account the efficiency of all participating entities simultaneously. In this paper, we present an aggregated anonymous key issue (AAKI) protocol to reduce the transmission burden between multiple authorities. Meanwhile, the non-interactive zero-knowledge proof aggregate exponentiation (NI-ZKPoKAE) protocol is designed to aggregate the transmitted secret values in AAKI. To reduce the computational burden of signers and verifiers, Blakley secret sharing, where the Hadamard matrix is used more efficiently to handle the (n,n)-threshold, is used to construct an efficient and fine-grained multi-authority ABS (EFMA-ABS) scheme. This brings high efficiency to all three types of parties involved in IoT authentication. Our above-mentioned protocols have been proven to be feasible and effective.

Secure Blockchain Transactions for Electronic Health Records based on an Improved Attribute-Based Signature Scheme (IASS)

Electronic Health Records (EHRs) are entirely controlled by hospitals, not patients, making it difficult to obtain medical advice from individual hospitals. Patients need to keep tabs on their health details and take back control of their medical data. The rapid development of blockchain technology has facilitated large-scale healthcare, including medical records and patient-related data. The technology provides comprehensive and immutable patient records and free access to electronic medical records for providers and treatment portals. To ensure the validity of the blockchain-connected EHR, the Improved Attribute-Based Signature Scheme (IASS) has considerable powers, allowing patients to approve messages based on attributes but not validated. In addition, it avoids the problem of having multiple authorities without a single or central source of trust for generating and distributing patient public/private keys and fits into the blockchain model for distributed data storage. By sharing a secret, pseudo-random activity seed between authorities, the protocol resists collusive attacks by corrupt officials. The technology provides patients with a comprehensive, immutable record and free access to their EHR from providers and treatment portals. To ensure the validity of blockchain-connected EHRs, propose an attribute-based multi-authority signature scheme that authorizes messages based on their attributes without revealing any information.

Short attribute-based signatures for arbitrary Turing machines from standard assumptions

This paper presents the first attribute-based signature (ABS) scheme supporting signing policies representable by Turing machines (TM), based on well-studied computational assumptions. Our work supports arbitraryTMs as signing policies in the sense that the TMs can accept signing attribute strings of unbounded polynomial length and there is no limit on their running time, description size, or space complexity. Moreover, we are able to achieve input-specific running time for the signing algorithm. All other known expressive ABS schemes could at most support signing policies realizable by either arbitrary polynomial-size circuits or TMs having a pre-determined upper bound on the running time. Consequently, those schemes can only deal with signing attribute strings whose lengths are a priori bounded, as well as suffers from the worst-case running time problem. On a more positive note, for the first time in the literature, the signature size of our ABS scheme only depends on the size of the signed message and is completely independent of the size of the signing policy under which the signature is generated. This is a significant achievement from the point of view of communication efficiency. Our ABS construction makes use of indistinguishability obfuscation (IO) for polynomial-size circuits and certain IO-compatible cryptographic tools. Note that, all of these building blocks including IO for polynomial-size circuits are currently known to be realizable under well-studied computational assumptions.

Blockchain based Securing Medical Records in Big Data Analytics

The patient privacy is danger while medical records and data are transmitted or share beyond secure big data. This is because violations push them to the margins and they begin to avoid fully revealing their stages. This kind of stages contains negative impact in scientific investigate. To overcome this issue, Secure Block Chain System for Managing and Sharing Electronic Medical Records in Big Data Field is proposed. In this manuscript, a Cryptographic Hash Generator (CHG) technique based Secured and Trusted Data storage and transmission using Block Chain (BC) in Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS). Initially, the Big data collected from the health care center is partitioned into sensitive and insensitive data. Block chain system utilizes an asymmetric cryptography for validating transactions authentication. Here, the user key is created through secured bitwise cryptographic hash generator (CHG) while there is required to fetch the newly record for usage. In block chain system, when a user seeking data from a healthcare application have forward a request to CHG. The message is send back to the user with a secret key for confirmation. The key can be decrypted or even denied access if only a valid user allows the user to link to this cluster. Only sensitive data were selected to the process of encryption for the process of encryption, this CHG technique employs the Discrete Shearlet Transform (DST) for encrypting the data, and the data’s are warehoused in the block chain to upgrade the level of security. And the insensitive data are put directly on the Hadoop Distributed File System. During the verification process, CHG is utilized for creating the request forward through the user. The operator creates the purpose of remote key to create the block (request) and signing the request using transaction private key, then forward to request queuing. To validate a request, the request from the queue is supplied first and an Improved Grey wolf Optimization algorithm (IGWO) is utilized to determine the optimal request that is fetch through the consensus node for initiating the process of validation. After accepting the user’s request, access is given to the user associated with input or requested data, then the verified request is set to broadcast. The proposed method is executed in JAVA and Hadoop platform. Experimental results show that the proposed BC-CHG-DST-IGWOA shows better performances of higher Efficiency 20.14%, 31.25%, 24.33%, 14.69%, lower time 16.12%, 15.09%, 21.36%, 46.26% compared with the existing methods, such as medical records managing and securing blockchain based system supported by genetic algorithm with discrete wavelet transform (BC-SMR-BD-GA-DWT), DQN-based optimization framework to secure shared blockchain systems (BC-SMR-BD-DQNSB), Hyper ledger blockchain enabled secure medical record management along deep learning-based diagnosis model (BC-SMR-BD-HBESDM-DLD), Secure attribute-based signature scheme with multiple authorities for blockchain in electronic health records system (BC-SMR-BD-MA-ABS) respectively.

Efficient Attribute Based Server-Aided Verification Signature

Attribute based signature (ABS) is a novel cryptographic primitive, which permits users to sign a message over attributes without revealing other information. A signature only reveals that it is signed by a signer whose some attributes meet an access policy. However, some ABS schemes only support the threshold access policy, where the signing algorithms are limited by the threshold. The threshold access policy can not express precise access control well. In addition, the computation cost of the verification algorithm is heavy since pairing operations are required. Pairing is costly operation comparing to exponentiation. Therefore, existing ABS schemes are not suitable to resource-limited devices, such as RFID tags and smart cards. In order to solve the issues above, we present a novel ABS scheme by using the attribute tree as access policy that expresses flexible access control. We utilize server-aid technique to help the verifier to verify signatures and reduce the computation burden. Our scheme is proved secure against unforgeable and anonymous under chosen-policy selective-message attack in the standard model. Compared with existing schemes, our scheme is more efficient in terms of private key generation and verification. The proposed scheme reduces users’ calculation burden and expresses more flexible access policy.

A flexible and lightweight privacy-preserving handshake protocol based on DTLShps for IoT

Anonymous authentication is widely studied for preserving the privacy of IoT devices . Although attribute-based signature (ABS) schemes can show identity attributes flexibly, letting the private key be generated by someone else is not safe. The computational overhead of traditional anonymous credential schemes based on zero-knowledge proofs (ZKP) is heavy for resource-constrained IoT devices. DTLShps, a lightweight handshake protocol based on software-defined networking (SDN), brings a new thought to verify certificates for resource-constrained IoT devices without anonymous functions. In this article, a lightweight privacy-preserving handshake protocol is designed based on DTLShps to flexibly present attributes of anonymous certificates for resource-constrained IoT devices. An authorization code is designed to represent the authorization status of each identity attribute defined in the X.509 standard. The IoT device cooperating with the CA can flexibly show arbitrary identity attributes to its peer by the authorization code. Only one signing operation of the elliptic curve digital signature algorithm (ECDSA) is needed to grant the authorization on the IoT device with the cooperation of the controller. The security of the proposed scheme is validated by the BAN logic and the tool Scyther. The performance evaluation shows that the computational delay on the IoT device and overall handshake delay is effectively reduced compared with the existing anonymous certificate schemes.

An efficient reusable attribute-based signature scheme for mobile services with multi access policies in fog computing

Fog computing is an emergent computing paradigm that supports the mobility and geographic distribution of Internet of Things (IoT) nodes and delivers context-aware applications with low latency to end-users. In fog computing, the critical obstacle restricting widespread deployment is security and privacy, especially how to build a lightweight fine-grained message authentication scheme in fog computing. In this paper, we first propose and give the formalization definition to a new variant of the attribute-based signature primitive (ABS), which we called Verifier-Policy Attribute-based Signature (VP-ABS). Distinct from the traditional ABS, in our VP-ABS primitive, the signature generated by the signer is decoupled with the access policy, which means the signer can generate a signature associated with some of his own attributes. Therefore, our VP-ABS can be reusable for multiple access policies. Then we also give a concrete VP-ABS construction over Type-3 pairing under Linear Secret Sharing Scheme (LSSS) policy which supports both AND and OR access gates. In addition, we rigorously prove our VP-ABS scheme is existentially unforgeable in the selective policy model under the adaptive chosen message attack (sP-EUF-CMA). Next, we give the feature comparison and theoretical analysis to our VP-ABS scheme as well as some other representative attribute authentication schemes to show the comprehensiveness of our scheme. To prove the correctness of the theoretical analysis and test the actual performance, we also do simulation experiments. Finally, we use our VP-ABS scheme to build an attribute-based fine-grained message authentication scheme for fog nodes in mobile microservices architecture with multiple access policies.

SPCABS: Signature-Policy Comparable Attribute-Based Signatures

Attribute-based signature is an attractive cryptographic primitive and finds broad applications in many fields. Existing attribute-based signature schemes deal with attributes in the way of “with” or “without,” and there is no attribute-based signature scheme that supports comparing attributes. Using the 0-encoding and 1-encoding, we propose an access structure algorithm and an attribute expansion algorithm, enabling the attribute-based signature scheme to effectively deal with the comparative attributes. Then, we propose a signature-policy comparable attribute-based signature scheme using the proposed expansion algorithms. The proposed scheme is existentially unforgeable under the computational Diffie–Hellman exponent (CDHE) assumption and achieves privacy in the sense of information theory. Theoretical analysis and simulation experiments show that our method is practical and has significant advantages in storage and computation overhead compared with the trivial way. Comparable attribute-based signature dramatically expands the application scenarios of attribute-based signature.

Federated Learning-Based Privacy Preservation with Blockchain Assistance in IoT 5G Heterogeneous Networks

In the area where privacy is of greater concern, federated learning,a distributed machine learning strategy for preserving privacy,is widely employed in several privacy concern applications. In the meantime, neural architectures became familiar with deep learning approaches for automatic tuning of the architecture of deep neural networks (DNN). While searching with neural architecture and federated learning has experienced several challenges, optimized neural architecture research in federated learning is extensively on demand. DNN faces numerous issues while training such user privacy and ensuring the integrity of the aggregated results obtained from a server. To provide solutions for the above-mentioned issues, enormous federated learning techniques worked towards preserving privacy and were applied in different situations. Still, it is an open challenge that enables users to verify if the cloud server functions appropriately while ensuring users’ privacy while training. Federated Learning Method is a new way to improve the accuracy and precision, since the previous approach failed to opt the solutions. Here, Elliptical Curve Cryptography with Blockchain-based Federated Learning (ECC-BFL)is proposed to ensure the confidentiality of users’ local gradients while performing federated learning. The parameters such as classification accuracy, running time, Communication overhead, Computation overhead, and transaction speed are considered. The values obtained for these parameters are compared against three standard methods, namely Biparing Method (BM) Homomorphic Cryptosystem (HC), and Multiple Authorities with Attribute-Based Signature scheme (MA-ABS)against proposed Elliptical Curve Cryptography with Blockchain-based Federated Learning (ECC-BFL). As a result, the proposed ECC-BFL achieved 95% of classification accuracy, 65 sec of running time, 76% of communication overhead, 63% of computation overhead, and 92% of transaction speed.

Secure Outsourced Attribute-Based Signatures with Perfect Anonymity in the Standard Model

Outsourced attribute-based signatures (OABS) enable users to sign messages without revealing specific identity information and are suitable for scenarios with limited computing power. Recently, Mo et al. proposed an expressive outsourced attribute-based signature scheme (Peer-to-Peer Networking and Applications, 11, 2017). In this paper, we show that Mo et al.’s scheme does not achieve any of the three security properties. Their scheme is incorrect. The adversary can collude with the malicious signing-cloud service provider (S-CSP) to forge valid signatures on any message and any attribute set. And the S-CSP could trace the access structures used to generate the signatures. Then, we treat the S-CSP as an adversary and present more accurate unforgeability and anonymity models for OABS to remedy the drawbacks of the previous ones. Finally, we propose a simple but significant improvement to fix our attacks. The improved scheme achieves correctness, unforgeability, and perfect anonymity while keeping the efficiency almost unchanged. We also prove the security of the improved scheme under the standard model.

Controllable anonymous authentication scheme based on blockchain and decentralized traceable attribute-based signature

The development of information technology and the enhancement of peoples attention to personal privacy security put forward higher requirements for the identity authentication mechanism of traditional Internet applications, which not only needs to realize the users identity authentication, but also protects the users privacy information to the greatest extent. Compared with the traditional digital signature schemes, the attribute-based signature scheme has the characteristics of anonymity, that is, the attribute-based signature can hide the signers identity information, and other users cannot link a signature to the signers identity (attribute set). In practical application scenarios, we usually need to monitor the identity of users to prevent the occurrence of anonymous abuse and dishonesty. Therefore, in order to balance these two seemingly contradictory requirements, this paper proposes a controllable anonymous authentication scheme based on blockchain and decentralized traceable attribute-based signature. By properly improving the existing traceable attribute-based signature scheme, the decentralized attribute authority is realized without affecting the efficiency, so as to prevent the corruption of single attribute authority on system security. The results show that the proposed scheme is suitable for electronic voting systems and other scenarios with decentralized controllable anonymous authentication requirements.

Blockchain-Based Mutual Authentication Protocol with Privacy Protection in Telemedicine

Telemedicine builds a patient-centered remote diagnosis and continuous monitoring service system, which can effectively alleviate the current situation of difficult and expensive medical treatment. This paper focuses on mutual authentication with privacy protection in telemedicine. First, we propose a decentralized multi-authority attribute-based signature scheme. The signature scheme can be used to verify the signer’s attributes without leaking the identity information, thereby achieving privacy protection while authenticating. Combined with the proposed signature scheme, a blockchain-based mutual authentication protocol with privacy protection in telemedicine is designed. By this protocol, patients and telemedicine terminal can encrypt and store the medical data off-chain, and store the data digest and decentralized attribute-based signature on the blockchain. As a result, the confidentiality of the data and the authenticity of the source can be guaranteed. In addition, the nature of the blockchain and signature ensure that accurate liability determination can be made when medical disputes occur. Theoretical analysis shows that our protocol is secure and practical.

A fine-grained anonymous handover authentication protocol based on consortium blockchain for wireless networks

Given the ubiquitous nature of wireless networks in today's society, protecting users' information and identity during handover authentication is paramount. Mobile network operators hope to implement a more flexible and fine-grained authentication to provide better and safer services. In this paper, we propose a new multi-attribute authority attribute-based signature (MA-ABS) scheme that has a constant-size signature. More specifically, we propose an anonymous handover authentication protocol that uses MA-ABS and consortium blockchain. This new protocol not only has fine-grained access control, but it protects the user's privacy and ensures an efficient and private handover.

Efficient Attribute-Based Signatures for Unbounded Arithmetic Branching Programs

This paper presents the first attribute-based signature (ABS) scheme in which the correspondence between signers and signatures is captured in an arithmetic model of computation. Specifically, we design a fully secure, i.e., adaptively unforgeable and perfectly signer-private ABS scheme for signing policies realizable by arithmetic branching programs (ABP), which are a quite expressive model of arithmetic computations. On a more positive note, the proposed scheme places no bound on the size and input length of the supported signing policy ABP’s, and at the same time, supports the use of an input attribute for an arbitrary number of times inside a signing policy ABP, i.e., the so called unbounded multi-use of attributes. The size of our public parameters is constant with respect to the sizes of the signing attribute vectors and signing policies available in the system. The construction is built in (asymmetric) bilinear groups of prime order, and its unforgeability is derived in the standard model under (asymmetric version of) the well-studied decisional linear (DLIN) assumption coupled with the existence of standard collision resistant hash functions. Due to the use of the arithmetic model as opposed to the boolean one, our ABS scheme not only excels significantly over the existing state-of-the-art constructions in terms of concrete efficiency, but also achieves improved applicability in various practical scenarios. Our principal technical contributions are (a) extending and refining the techniques of Okamoto and Takashima [PKC 2011, PKC 2013], which were originally developed in the context of boolean span programs, to the arithmetic setting; and (b) innovating new ideas to allow unbounded multi-use of attributes inside ABP’s, which themselves are of unbounded size and input length.

SDABS: A Flexible and Efficient Multi-Authority Hybrid Attribute-Based Signature Scheme in Edge Environment

The explosive growth of the Internet of Things and modern networking technologies lay the foundation for the development of intelligent transportation systems and smart cities. To analyzing massive data under the required time for transportation issues, the edge computing paradigm is applied, which pre-processing large amounts of data at the network edge to save bandwidth and improve response time. However, data reliability and security are still facing many challenges in the edge environment. In this article, we propose a multi-authority hybrid attribute-based signature scheme (SDABS). It is composed of four phases: system initialization, signature generation, signature verification, and attribute revocation phases. To better describe frequently changing features in the transportation systems like location, the dynamic attribute is introduced in building the signature. The multi-layer policy tree is applied to support flexible and various access policies, which also naturally form user groups and help data searching. Besides, the multi-authority structure is more suitable for the distributed edge environment. We evaluate SDABS from both theoretical analysis and practical analysis. Compared with two classical signature schemes (MABS and ODMA-ABS), experimental results demonstrate that the proposed SDABS can achieve better performance at an acceptable cost in the terms of attributes and attribute authorities.