Bilinear Pairing Operations Research Articles

Efficient and Secure Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-Based Encryption Without Pairing for Cloud-Assisted Smart Grid

Cloud-assisted smart grid has been broadly deployed to improve the economics, efficiency, sustainability, and reliability of electricity services. The new revolution of technology will also bring new challenges to data security, particularly data confidentiality. As a promising encryption method for supporting fine-grained access control, attribute-based encryption (ABE) is widely given attention by the academia and industry. However, most existing schemes suffer from the efficiency problem limiting its deployment for the cloud-assisted smart grid, especially for resource-limited users. To address this problem, this paper proposes two efficient pairing-free ciphertext-policy attribute-based schemes that eliminate the computation-intensive bilinear pairing operation. The basic scheme only uses some simple scalar multiplications based on elliptic curves, and the enhanced scheme provides an important usability feature, namely the users and attributes revocation. The security of the proposed schemes is reduced to the elliptic curve decisional Diffie-Hellman problem. Finally, the performance analysis and extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed schemes are suitable for the cloud-assisted smart grid.

Robust Conditional Privacy-Preserving Authentication based on Pseudonym Root with Cuckoo Filter in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

Numerous privacy-preserving authentication schemes have been proposed but vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) still suffer from security and privacy issues as well as computation and communication overheads. In this paper, we proposed a robust conditional privacy-preserving authentication scheme based on pseudonym root with cuckoo filter to meet security and privacy requirements and reduce computation and communication overheads. In our proposed scheme, we used a new idea to generate pseudonyms for vehicles where each on-board unit (OBU) saves one pseudonym, named as “pseudonym root,” and generates all pseudonyms from the same pseudonym. Therefore, OBU does not need to enlarge its storage. In addition, the scheme does not use bilinear pairing operation that causes computation overhead and has no certification revocation list that leads to computation and communication overheads. The proposed scheme has lightweight mutual authentication among all parties and just for once. Moreover, it provides strong anonymity to preserve privacy and resists ordinary attacks. We analyzed our proposed scheme and showed that it meets security and privacy requirements of VANETs and is more efficient than traditional schemes. The communication and computation overheads were also discussed to show the cost-effectiveness of the proposed scheme.

An Efficient Elliptic Curve Cryptography-Based Without Pairing KPABE for Internet of Things

The increasing deployment of Internet of Things in diversified fields provides groundwork for smart living. However, at the same time, it brings challenges like security and privacy. Among the numerous proposed security schemes, attribute-based encryption (ABE) is considered as one of the most promising security and privacy preserving scheme in distributed environment (or cloud environment). Many variants of the ABE exist, but most of them employ the expensive bilinear pairing operations. In this article, we have proposed a lightweight elliptic-curve-cryptography-based key-policy ABE without bilinear pairing and having a feature of key refresh/update mechanism. Also, the key distribution is done by the authority, which incorporates direct attribute/user revocation. The scheme is secured under elliptic curve decisional Diffie–Hellman assumption. The performance analysis demonstrates that the proposed scheme is efficient as compared to the existing ABE schemes.

Extensible Conditional Privacy Protection Authentication Scheme for Secure Vehicular Networks in a Multi-Cloud Environment

With an increasing number of cloud service providers (CSPs), research works on multi-cloud environments to provide solutions to avoid vendor lock-in and deal with the single-point failure problem have expanded considerably. However, a few schemes focus on the conditional privacy protection authentication of vehicular networks under a multi-cloud environment. In this regard, we propose a robust and extensible authentication scheme for vehicular networks to fulfil the ever-growing diversified service demands from users. According to our solution, the vehicles need to register with the trusted authority (TA) only once to achieve a fast and efficient authentication with CSPs. Additionally, as long as the new CSP is successfully registered in TA, it can participate in vehicular service. A cloud broker, which is managed by the TA, is responsible for connecting all the cloud services; consequently, the complexity involved in the selection of CSPs is hidden from the users’ view. A detailed security analysis establishes that our scheme can fulfil conditional privacy protection and achieve the security objectives of vehicular networks. Our scheme is based on elliptic curve cryptography and does not employ the complex bilinear pairing operation. An evaluation of performance of the proposed scheme indicates that it is suitable for applications involving vehicular networks.

Privacy-Preserving and Pairing-Free Multirecipient Certificateless Encryption With Keyword Search for Cloud-Assisted IIoT

Nowadays, cloud-assisted Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) has become pervasive in modern enterprises, because it supplies a promising way to transform the operation mode of existing industrial facilities, to enhancing the production efficiency and lowering the manufacturing cost. In order to preserve the privacy of enterprises, sensitive industrial data needs to be encrypted prior to being uploaded to the cloud. Recently, certificateless encryption with keyword search (CLKS) was introduced to resolve the problem of encrypted data retrieval in cloud-assisted IIoT. However, the existing CLKS schemes only support a single-recipient keyword search and need to depend on the costly bilinear pairing that is disliked by the resource-constrained IIoT devices. Moreover, most of the existing CLKS schemes are vulnerable to the keyword guessing attack, and thus fail to protect the privacy of searched data. In this article, we develop a privacy-preserving and pairing-free multirecipient CLKS scheme for cloud-assisted IIoT. The proposed scheme has the following merits: 1) supporting multirecipient keyword search function; 2) requiring no costly bilinear pairing operations; and 3) providing resistance against keyword guessing attacks. The performance comparison and analysis demonstrate that it is more efficient than the existing CLKS schemes and is appropriate for the cloud-assisted IIoT.

RSMA: Reputation System-Based Lightweight Message Authentication Framework and Protocol for 5G-Enabled Vehicular Networks

Traditional public key infrastructure-based authentication schemes provide vehicular networks with identity authentication and conditional privacy protection, which are not sufficient for assessing the credibility of messages. Additionally, although the new generation of cellular networks (5G) can dramatically improve the transmission efficiency of the messages, many existing authentication schemes are based on complex bilinear pairing operations, and the calculation time is too long to be suitable for delay-sensitive 5G-enabled vehicular networks. To address these issues, we propose a reputation system-based lightweight message authentication framework and protocol for 5G-enabled vehicular networks. The trusted authority (TA) is in charge of reputation management. A vehicle with a reputation score below the given threshold cannot obtain a credit reference from the TA for participating in the communication; therefore, the number of untrusted messages in vehicular networks is reduced from the source. Security analysis shows that our scheme is secure against an adaptively chosen-message attack, and also satisfies a series of requirements of vehicular networks. The scheme is based on the elliptic curve cryptosystem and supports batch authentication; therefore, it shows better performance in terms of time consumption when compared with related schemes.

A provable and secure mobile user authentication scheme for mobile cloud computing services

SummaryThe mobile cloud computing (MCC) has enriched the quality of services that the clients access from remote cloud‐based servers. The growth in the number of wireless users for MCC has further augmented the requirement for a robust and efficient authenticated key agreement mechanism. Formerly, the users would access cloud services from various cloud‐based service providers and authenticate one another only after communicating with the trusted third party (TTP). This requirement for the clients to access the TTP during each mutual authentication session, in earlier schemes, contributes to the redundant latency overheads for the protocol. Recently, Tsai et al have presented a bilinear pairing based multi‐server authentication (MSA) protocol, to bypass the TTP, at least during mutual authentication. The scheme construction works fine, as far as the elimination of TTP involvement for authentication has been concerned. However, Tsai et al scheme has been found vulnerable to server spoofing attack and desynchronization attack, and lacks smart card‐based user verification, which renders the protocol inapt for practical implementation in different access networks. Hence, we have proposed an improved model designed with bilinear pairing operations, countering the identified threats as posed to Tsai scheme. Additionally, the proposed scheme is backed up by performance evaluation and formal security analysis.

An Efficient Proxy Ring Signature Without Bilinear Pairing*

Proxy ring signature is a proxy signature designed to protect the privacy of the proxy signer. In this paper, we propose a new proxy ring signature based on the Schnorr's signature. Our scheme combines the idea of the Schnorr's signature with the method of existing structure of proxy ring signature. In order to improve the performance, we eliminate the use of bilinear pairing operation. We only use the hash function in the signature verification phase. Because of above features, the proxy ring signature scheme we proposed is more efficient in computation. We also prove that our scheme is unforgeable against all kinds of adversaries in the random oracle model.

An Anonymous and Efficient Multiserver Authenticated Key Agreement With Offline Registration Centre

Multiserver authentication (MSA) architecture permits its registered users to get the services of various service providers without performing separate registrations with each server. Since, a single registration from registration authority, a trusted third party, is sufficient to get mutually authenticated with service providers, onwards. In this paper, we have emphasized only on the MSA-based schemes that do not require online registration authority for mutual authentication. While, considering those MSA schemes, to date, there is no secure and efficient MSA protocol in our observation that is free of all four limitations at the same time, such as 1) free of the hassle of storage of server-based parameters in users’ smart card by registration authority, 2) free of the transmission of user-based identities to all servers in a network, 3) free of a single secret key distribution to all servers as assumed in a trusted system, and 4) free from employing costly bilinear pairing operations. In view of those shortcomings, we present an anonymous MSA protocol that nearly counters all those problems using elliptic curve cryptography and escaping costly pairing operations. Our scheme also demonstrates the scheme's robustness using formal security analysis employing random oracle model and automated tool analysis.

Efficient Certificateless Conditional Privacy-Preserving Authentication Scheme in VANETs

Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) are an increasing important paradigm for greatly enhancing roadway system efficiency and traffic safety. To widely deploy VANETs in real life, it is critical to deal with the security and privacy issues in VANETs. In this paper, we propose a certificateless conditional privacy preserving authentication (CCPPA) scheme based on certificateless cryptography and elliptic curve cryptography for secure vehicle-to-infrastructure communication in VANETs. In the proposed scheme, a roadside unit (RSU) can simultaneously verify plenty of received messages such that the total verification time may be sharply decreased. Furthermore, the security analysis indicates that the proposed scheme is provably secure in the random oracle model and fulfills all the requirements on security and privacy. To further improve efficiency, both map-to-point hash operation and bilinear pairing operation are not employed. Compared with previous CCPPA schemes, the proposed scheme prominently cuts down computation delay of message signing and verification by 66.9%–85.5% and 91.8%–93.4%, respectively, and reduces communication cost by 44.4%. Extensive simulations show that the proposed scheme is practicable and achieves prominent performances of very little average message delay and average message loss ratio and thus is appropriate for realistic applications.

Efficient Conditional Anonymity With Message Integrity and Authentication in a Vehicular Ad-Hoc Network

Vehicles in a vehicular ad-hoc network (VANET) broadcast beacons giving safety-related and traffic information. In an open-access environment, this means that the VANET is susceptible to security and privacy issues. In this paper, we propose a new pseudo-identity-based scheme for conditional anonymity with integrity and authentication in a VANET. The proposed scheme uses a pseudonym in the joining process with the road-side unit (RSU) to protect the real identity even from the RSU, in case it is compromised. All previous identity-based schemes have been prone to insider attackers, and have not met the revocation process. Our scheme resolves these drawbacks as the vehicle signs the beacon with a signature obtained from the RSU. Our scheme satisfies the requirements for security and privacy, and especially the requirements for message integrity and authentication, privacy preservation, non-repudiation, traceability, and revocation. In addition, it provides conditional anonymity to guarantee the protection of an honest vehicle's real identity, unless malicious activities are detected. It is also resistant to common attacks such as modification, replay, impersonation, and man-in-the-middle (MITM) attacks. Although the numerous existing schemes have used a bilinear pairing operation, our scheme does not depend on this due to the complex operations involved, which cause significant computation overhead. Furthermore, it does not have a certification revocation list, giving rise to significant costs due to storage and inefficient communication. Our analysis demonstrates that our scheme can satisfy the security and privacy requirements of a VANET more effectively than previous schemes. We also compare our scheme with the recently proposed schemes in terms of communication and computation and demonstrate its cost-efficiency and appropriateness in working with the VANET. Meanwhile, the computation costs of the beacon signing and verification in our scheme are reduced by 49.9% and 33.3%, respectively.

Efficient and Anonymous Certificateless Multi-Message and Multi-Receiver Signcryption Scheme Based on ECC

As the further extension of the multi-receiver signcryption, the multi-message and multi-receiver signcryption allows a sender to simultaneously signcrypt different messages for different receivers in only one logic operation, which makes it more flexible than the traditional multi-receiver signcryption in which only the same and unique message can be sent to all authorized receivers. The existing multi-message and multi-receiver signcryption schemes are constructed based on either the identity-based cryptography or the public key infrastructure-based cryptography, and thus, they have to suffer from the key escrow problem inherent in the identity-based cryptography or the public key certificate management burden related with the public key infrastructure-based cryptography. Certificateless public key cryptography provides an idea to solve the key escrow problem and eliminate the public key certificate management burden and has been applied to many cryptographic algorithms. In this paper, to avoid the above problems in the existing multi-message and multi-receiver signcryption schemes, the concept of the certificateless public key cryptography was introduced into the designing of the multi-message and multi-receiver signcryption, and a certificateless multi-message and multi-receiver signcryption scheme was proposed. The proposed scheme is free from the key escrow problem and the public key certificate management burden because it is constructed based on the certificateless public key cryptography. Moreover, compared with the existing schemes, it is improved in efficiency because it does not use the bilinear pairing operations but utilizes the limited number of scalar point multiplication on elliptic curve cryptography operations. At the same time, the proposed scheme achieves receiver anonymity.

Efficient and Secure Identity-based Strong Key-Insulated Signature Scheme without Pairings

Public Key Cryptosystem (PKC) completely relies under the assumption that user’s private key is absolutely secure. Exposure of private key may lead to disastrous situations in the communication network. To diminish the damage of private key exposure in PKC, key-insulation mechanism was introduced. In key-insulated cryptosystems, a user can update his private key with the help of a physically secure device from time to time. Identity-based cryptosystem alleviates the heavy certificate management problems in traditional PKC. Recently, many Identity-based key insulated signature schemes have been proposed in literature; however, most of the Identity-based schemes are designed based on the expensive bilinear pairing operation over elliptic curves. Due to the heavy computational cost of a pairing, the pairing based schemes are less efficient in practice. In order to improve the computational and communicational efficiency and to resist the problem of private key exposure in Identity-based signature schemes, we present a pairing-free key insulated signature scheme in identity based setting. We show that this scheme is unforgeable and achieves strong key insulation property with secure key updates, under the hardness of the Elliptic Curve Discrete Logarithm Problem (ECDLP). The performance analysis shows that our scheme is more efficient than the existing schemes.

A Lightweight And privacy-preserving public cloud auditing scheme without bilinear pairings in smart cities

Smart Cities have become a global strategy. However, massive data generated by various smart devices need to be uploaded and stored to the cloud servers. It is critical to ensure the integrity and privacy of the stored data. Quite a few public cloud auditing schemes have been proposed recently. However, most of them use bilinear pairing operations in the audit phase, requiring a significant time cost. Meanwhile, users (may be resource-constrained mobile devices or sensor nodes) still need to perform significant computations, like computing meta data for each data block, which bring a huge burden of calculation for these users. Moreover, those schemes cannot effectively protect users’ data privacy. Thus, we propose a lightweight and privacy-preserving public cloud auditing scheme for smart cities that does not require bilinear pairings. First, the proposed scheme is pairing-free, and allowing a third party auditor to generate authentication meta set on behalf of users. Furthermore, it also protects data privacy against the third party auditor and the cloud service providers. In addition, this new scheme can be easily and naturally extended to batch auditing in a multi-user scenario. Detailed security and performance analyses show that the proposed scheme is more secure and efficient compared to the existing public cloud auditing schemes.

Efficient Certificateless Anonymous Multi-Receiver Encryption Scheme without Bilinear Parings

With the growing development of Internet technology and popularization of mobile devices, we easily access the Internet anytime and anywhere by mobile devices. It has brought great convenience for our lives. But it brought more challenges than traditional wired communication, such as confidentiality and privacy. In order to improve security and privacy protection in using mobile network, numerous multi-receiver identity-based encryption schemes have been proposed with bilinear pairing and probabilistic hap-to-point (HTP) function. To address the troubles of private key escrow in multi-receiver encryption scheme based on ID-PKC, recently, some certificateless anonymous multi-receiver encryption (CLAMRE) schemes are introduced. But previous CLAMRE schemes using the bilinear pairing are not suitable to mobile device because the use of bilinear pairing and probabilistic hash-to-point (HTP) function results in expensive operation costs in encryption or decryption. In this paper, we propose an efficient CLAMRE scheme using elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) without bilinear pairing and HTP hash function. Since our scheme does not use bilinear pairing and HTP operation during the encryption and decryption process, the proposed CLAMRE scheme has much less computation cost than the latest CLAMRE schemes. Performance analysis shows that runtime of our scheme is much less when the sender generates ciphertext, compared with existing schemes. Security analysis shows proposed CLAMRE scheme provides confidentiality of message and receiver anonymity under the random oracle model with the difficulties of decision Diffie-Hellman problem and against the adversaries defined in CL-PKC system.

An Efficient Tate Pairing Algorithm for a Decentralized Key-Policy Attribute Based Encryption Scheme in Cloud Environments

Attribute-based encryption (ABE) is used for achieving data confidentiality and access control in cloud environments. Most often ABE schemes are constructed using bilinear pairing which has a higher computational complexity, making algorithms inefficient to some extent. The motivation of this paper is on achieving user privacy during the interaction with attribute authorities by improving the efficiency of ABE schemes in terms of computational complexity. As a result the aim of this paper is two-fold; firstly, to propose an efficient Tate pairing algorithm based on multi-base number representation system using point halving (TP-MBNR-PH) with bases 1/2, 3, and 5 to reduce the cost of bilinear pairing operations and, secondly, the TP-MBNR-PH algorithm is applied in decentralized KP-ABE to compare its computational costs for encryption and decryption with existing schemes.

EDAS: Efficient Data Aggregation Scheme for Internet of Things

ABSTRACTThe pervasiveness of the Internet has attracted a new paradigm of technology known as Internet-of-Things (IoT). The numerous devices connected to IoT generate huge amount of data which must be protected and efficiently verified by the data center. To achieve big data authentication in IoT, several certificateless aggregate signature schemes have been proposed. However, their design is based on bilinear pairing operation, which is known to be mathematically complex. In this work, we propose a secure and efficient data aggregation scheme for IoT known as Efficient Data Aggregation Scheme (EDAS) without using complex mathematical operation. The performance analysis shows that EDAS is computationally more efficient than related schemes.

A pairing-free and provably secure certificateless signature scheme

Certificateless Signature (CLS) scheme is a notable cryptographic technique for solving the key escrow problem in identity-based cryptosystem (IBC). In the CLS, the private key is computed collectively by both the key generation center (KGC) and the signer which ensures that no vindictive KGC masquerades the actual signer. Recently, a number of CLS schemes have been proposed using bilinear pairing and show their immunity under standard security model. It is well known that one such pairing operation requires significantly more computational cost than the other cryptographic operations. In this paper, we propose a new CLS scheme using elliptic curve cryptography (ECC), which does not require bilinear pairing operation. Our CLS scheme is analyzed formally and found to be provably secure against both the Type-I and Type-II attacks based on the intractability of elliptic curve discrete logarithm problem (ECDLP) under the random oracle model. Performance evaluation demonstrates that the proposed CLS scheme outperforms than other competitive CLS schemes.

Conditional Privacy-Preserving Authentication Using Registration List in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) have increased in popularity in recent years and play an extremely important role in the intelligent transportation field. However, the demands of larger communication networks and the integrated message verification process for ensuring security incur more communication and computation overheads, and directly affect the efficiency of existing VANET schemes. To address this issue, this paper proposes a novel and practical conditional privacy-preserving authentication scheme, which uses the registration list instead of the revocation list to reduce the communication overhead. Specifically, our scheme can prevent malicious vehicles from disrupting the security features of VANETs. Moreover, we do not use the bilinear pairing operation, which is the most complicated operation in modern cryptography, thus significantly reducing the computation overhead and communication overhead. Security and performance analyses demonstrate that our proposed scheme is more secure and efficient than current schemes, and that the proposed scheme is more suitable for VANET deployments.

An Efficient Certificateless Generalized Signcryption Scheme

Generalized signcryption can adaptively work as an encryption scheme, a signature scheme, or a signcryption scheme with only one algorithm. The paper proposes an efficient certificateless generic signcryption scheme without utilizing bilinear pairing operations. It is proved to satisfy confidentiality and unforgeability against chosen ciphertext and message attacks in an adaptive manner, respectively, in the random oracle model. Due to the lower computational cost and communication overhead, the proposed scheme is suitable for low power and processor devices.