Certificateless Public Key Cryptography Research Articles

Leakage-Resilient Anonymous Multireceiver Certificateless Encryption Resistant to Side-Channel Attacks

Anonymous multireceiver encryption (AMRE) allows a data provider to transmit a ciphertext to a designated group of receivers. Any receiver of the designated group can get the plaintext by decrypting this ciphertext while the receiver's identity is concealed to other receivers. In the past, several anonymous multireceiver certificateless encryption (AMR-CLE) schemes based on the certificateless public-key cryptography (CL-PKC) were proposed to remove both the certificate management problem of AMRE schemes based on the conventional public-key cryptography and the key escrow problem of AMR-IBE schemes based on the ID-based public-key cryptography. Recently, side-channel attacks endanger the existing cryptographic schemes, AMRE, AMR-IBE, AMR-CLE, etc. To resist to such attacks, leakage-resilient cryptography is a novel way. However, until now, there exists no multireceiver encryption or AMRE scheme resistant to side-channel attacks. In this article, we present the <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$first$</tex-math></inline-formula> leakage-resilient anonymous multireceiver certificateless encryption (LR-AMR-CLE) scheme. In our scheme, attackers are granted to repeatedly extract fractional content of each secret key participated in our scheme and retains the original security of AMR-CLE schemes.

A certificateless multi-dimensional data aggregation scheme for smart grid

In the context of the smart grid, the use of smart meters to regularly collect electricity data from customers poses a significant risk of privacy disclosure. Furthermore, traditional data aggregation schemes assume a fully trusted authority, neglecting the possibility of malicious trusted third parties and collusive attacks from control centers and gateways, which raises privacy invasion concerns for users. To address this issue, this article proposes a multi-dimensional data aggregation scheme based on certificateless public key cryptography for smart grid, which utilizes Paillier homomorphic encryption system in a fog computing-based architecture and implements authentication and key negotiation among member users. This scheme is designed to resist collusive attacks from control centers (CC) and fog nodes (FNs), while also protecting users’ privacy even in the face of a malicious key generation center (KGC). Detailed security analysis demonstrates that the proposed scheme meets the security requirements of the smart grid. Additionally, Performance analysis shows that the proposed scheme can effectively reduce the computational overhead of both smart meters and aggregators compared to existing multidimensional data aggregation schemes.

Smart contract‐based resource allocation service mechanism for internet of vehicles

AbstractAs an essential part of the intelligent transportation system, vehicular ad hoc network plays a vital role in the application of the Internet of Vehicles and security services. However, as the scale of the network continues to increase, trust‐based access and data sharing between vehicles have also become essential security issues. Given how to allocate vehicle resources safely, efficiently and reliably, this paper proposes a blockchain‐based key data sharing mechanism for the Internet of Vehicles. We first utilize certificateless public key cryptography to alleviate redundancy overhead and key escrow issues. Second, with the help of the security, decentralization, and non‐tampering characteristics of the blockchain, two smart contracts are designed and used to realize vehicle identity management and data access control. The identity chain smart contract solves the security problem of vehicle identity management, and the data chain smart contract ensures reliable transaction verification and efficient resource management. At the same time, an auction method is proposed to facilitate vehicle resource transactions. The experimental results show that our solution can realize secure data sharing of the Internet of Vehicles and ensure the operating efficiency of the system. Regarding system overhead, the proposed scheme has 30.6% and 33% lower private key generation overhead and 3.3% and 20.1% lower resource transaction time than AFSN and BSM under the same conditions. In addition, using our bidding method in data chain smart contracts can have a regulatory effect on market data transactions. In the aspect of resource transaction efficiency, for the change of the number of buyers, the transaction completion rate and transaction time of the proposed scheme are better than those of the contrast scheme. When the number of buyers is 100, the transaction completion rate was 9.2% higher than that of AFSN and 17.3% higher than that of BAM. The transaction time of the scheme is 32.2% and 48.1% lower than that of AFSN and BSM, respectively.

Privacy-Preserving Mutual Heterogeneous Signcryption Schemes Based on 5G Network Slicing

With the wide application of 5G network, much research has been carried out in recent years toward the 5G network slicing technology in order to save 5G network resources and satisfy the service requirements of different users. Different public key cryptosystems may be deployed in different 5G network slicings. Therefore, heterogeneous signcryption is required to achieve secure communications between different 5G network slices. The existing scheme is a one-to-one communication between 5G network slicings. To obtain one-to-many and many-to-one secure communications, two new privacy-preserving heterogeneous signcryption schemes have been proposed in this article based on 5G network slicings, which can accomplish mutual communications between the public key infrastructure (PKI) and the certificateless public-key cryptography. In this work, we present PKI <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\to $ </tex-math></inline-formula> CLC completely anonymous multireceiver signcryption (PMRCHS) and CLC <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\to $ </tex-math></inline-formula> PKI heterogeneous aggregate signcryption (CPHAS) schemes based on the 5G Internet of Things (IoT) slicing and the 5G Internet of Vehicle (IoV) slicing. Under the random oracle model (ROM), the proposed schemes have proved to satisfy confidentiality and unforgeability under the computational Diffie–Hellman problem and discrete logarithm problem (DLP). Furthermore, we make comparisons of the proposed work with the existing works in terms of computational cost, communication cost, anonymity, and communication direction. The results show that the proposed schemes are more secure and effective.

ECDSA-based certificateless conditional privacy-preserving authentication scheme in Vehicular Ad Hoc Network

A Certificateless Public Key Cryptography (CL-PKC) aims to avoid the drawback of both traditional public key cryptography which requires a Public Key Infrastructure (PKI), and Identity-Based Public Key Cryptography (ID-PKC) which suffers from the inherent key escrow problem. In Vehicular Ad Hoc Network (VANET), a Certificateless Conditional Privacy Preserving Authentication (CCPPA) fulfills all known VANET security requirements in order to resolve challenges related to security and privacy. However, the existing certificateless schemes only achieve a trust level 2 according to the hierarchy defined by Girault. In case the partial private key is leaked, a malicious node can replace the public key since the public key is not bound to an identity. As a result, the trusted authority can only identify malicious nodes by using their pseudo identities. Al-Riyami and Paterson introduced a binding technique that allows to lift the trust level of a normal certificateless scheme to a trust level 3 by using a binding technique. This paper proposes new CCPPA schemes that use Al-Riyami and Paterson's technique, can achieve a stronger security and achieve a trust level 3. In case the partial private key is leaked, only the legitimate node can use the corresponding public key which has been certified by the trusted authority. As a result, the proposed CCPPA schemes address the vulnerability related to the public key replacement attack which is present in several CCPPA schemes. Our schemes also offer a tracing technique which consists of allowing the trusted authority to identify a malicious node using both its pseudo identity and public key. The proposed schemes use ECC cryptography and avoid Map-to-Hash function and bilinear pairing. Also, we called our schemes ECDSA-CCPPA and ECDSA*-CCPPA since they allow to respectively implement Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA) and the modified ECDSA* during authentication process in VANET. A security analysis is performed and proves that the ECDSA-CCPPA and ECDSA*-CCPPA schemes are secure in the random oracle. Actually, the ECDSA*-CCPPA scheme has an advantage over ECDSA-CCPPA in that it allows to perform a batch verification of signatures, where RSUs can support vehicles by collecting vehicle's signatures and verifying their messages in congested areas in order to reduce verification time. Additionally, a performance analysis is carried out to compare ECDSA*-CCPPA with several existing schemes. The simulation results show that ECDSA*-CCPPA outperforms the studied schemes with regard to the signature and verification process of one message. Moreover, it has the less overhead when compared to the studied certificateless schemes.

Implementing a secure remote patient monitoring system

ABSTRACT Remote patient monitoring (RPM) system is an efficient technology that allows reducing healthcare costs and contamination risks, especially in the context of a pandemic. However, security and data privacy are the major challenges that hinder the development of such technology. A secure RPM system should satisfy several security requirements such as authentication, confidentiality, and access control. Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) is one of the main widely-used key management schemes. Unfortunately, in an e-Health system supporting constrained devices, PKI suffers from some issues related to the burden of certificate management (e.g., revocation, storage, and distribution) and the computational cost of certification verification. In this paper, we present our contribution to the development of a secure RPM system. Our security solution is based on Certificate-less Public Key Cryptography (CL-PKC) which ensures a dynamic solution for securing communications between patient devices and the e-Health services core. The proposed solution provides secure authentication and key agreement protocol to establish secret session keys. These keys are used for secure exchanging real-time electronic health records (EHR). To evaluate our approach, we conducted both simulation and real experiments. The security and performance analysis show that our approach is secure and effective while being easy to implement on resource-constrained devices with a low computational cost.

Broadcast Proxy Reencryption Based on Certificateless Public Key Cryptography for Secure Data Sharing

Broadcast proxy reencryption (BPRE), which combines broadcast encryption (BE) and proxy reencryption (PRE), is a technology used for the redistribution of data uploaded on the cloud to multiple users. BPRE reencrypts data encrypted by the distributor and then uploads it to the cloud into a ciphertext that at a later stage targets multiple recipients. As a result of this, flexible data sharing is possible for multiple recipients. However, various inefficiencies and vulnerabilities of the BE, such as the recipient anonymity problem and the key escrow problem, also creep into BPRE. Our aim in this study was to address this problem of the existing BPRE technology. The partial key verification problem that appeared in the process of solving the key escrow problem was solved, and the computational efficiency was improved by not using bilinear pairing, which requires a lot of computation time.

Efficient and anonymous multi‐message and multi‐receiver electronic health records sharing scheme without secure channel based on blockchain

AbstractThe sharing of electronic health records (EHR) helps the patients increase the accuracy of treatment, while promoting the development of the hospital and the research of medical field compared to traditional paper‐based medical records. However, due to the sensitivity of medical data and the difference of the standard about EHR, it is likely to lead to some security problems such as the leakage of patient's privacy and the difficulty of data sharing. To accomplish the secure storage and effective sharing of EHR, we propose an efficient and anonymous multi‐message and multi‐receiver EHR sharing scheme without secure channel based on blockchain (BEAMMRS). We use blockchain technology and cloud server to store EHR together, which ensures the security and immutability. Moreover, we combine certificateless public key cryptography and elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) to solve the certificate management burden and key escrow problems. Our scheme utilizes multi‐message and multi‐receiver signcryption algorithm to enable medical data providers to send different messages to multiple data requesters by executing one signcryption operation, which satisfies the multi‐message sending requirements of the data providers in the communication environment. Meanwhile, the key generation center (KGC) sends the pseudo partial private key to the data user through the public channel. Only the authorized data user can successfully find out the real partial private key, which avoids the key leakage and economic cost caused by the secure channel. Security analysis and performance evaluation demonstrate that the proposed BEAMMRS scheme meets stronger security and higher computational efficiency than other similar schemes.

A Certificateless Authenticated Key Agreement Scheme for the Power IoT

Power Internet of Things (IoT) is the application of IoT technology in the field of power grid, which can better control all kinds of power equipment, power personnel and operating environment. However, access to mass terminals brings higher requirements for terminal authentication and key management for the power IoT. And the traditional public key infrastructure (PKI) and identity-based public key cryptography (IB-PKC) exist the problems of certificate management and key escrow. Therefore, the paper proposes a novel authenticated key agreement scheme based on the certificateless public key cryptography (CL-PKC) mechanism. In addition, the proposed scheme is proven with the improved extended Canetti-Krawczyk (eCK) security model. Finally, the implementation of the authenticated key agreement protocol is given based on the actual application requirement of the power IoT, and the analysis and comparison of the simulation demonstrates that the proposed scheme has higher efficiency and would be suitable for the power IoT.

A Cross-Domain Authentication Optimization Scheme between Heterogeneous IoT Applications

With the continuous enrichment of the Internet of Things (IoT) applications, the demand for value exchange and collaborative control between heterogeneous IoT applications is increasing. However, the user management space varies depending on the IoT application, where the security domain stands as an example. It is one of the key technologies of data sharing between heterogeneous IoT organizations to cross the boundary of the security domain and verify the identity and authority of users in other security domains. Aiming at the slow speed of authentication protocol authority authentication during cross-domain access and without considering the actual cross-domain situation, the same cryptographic system parameters are used for all communication nodes in a cross-domain environment. This article proposes a heterogeneous Internet of Things data access authority authentication scheme between applications. Based on certificate-less public key cryptography and smart contract technology, a certificate-less cross-domain authentication scheme that supports parameter differentiation is designed and implemented. The theoretical and empirical analyses, comparing the communication volume, identity signature, and verification calculation cost, validated that the method proposed improves the cross-domain identity authorization authentication ability and supports the use of differentiated cryptographic system parameters among different IoT applications.

Certificateless Public Key Systems Aggregation: An enabling technique for 5G multi-domain security management and delegation

Network slicing is promising to provide the most cost-effective way of supporting 5G and beyond End-to-End (E2E) services in a multi-domain/multi-tenant environment. However, security issues are expected to worsen. Indeed, a 5G E2E service could be provided among participation of multiple stakeholders deploying each its security mechanism, which would reduce the flexibility and efficiency that are supposed to characterize 5G services. Also, fierce competition for market share may lead some stakeholders to cheat in the processing of individuals’ data and thus infringe on privacy, and undermine the trust between stakeholders. Public Key Cryptography is widely used where the main challenge is how to ensure the authenticity of cryptographic keys. Thus, a trusted third party is the most common way to assure binding a public–private key pair to the identity of the owner, where the word trusted differs from a public key scheme to another. In Public Key Infrastructure, the Certification Authority is trusted for not forging users’ certificates. In Identity-Based Public Key Cryptography, the Private Key Generator is trusted for not decrypting entities’ ciphertext, let alone forging their signatures. Similarly, in Certificateless Public Key Cryptography, the Key Generator Center (KGC) is trusted for not replacing entities’ public keys. In this paper, we propose an aggregation of several Certificateless Public Key systems in a 5G multi-domain/multi-tenant environment to merge them into a virtual cryptosystem without requiring any sort of trustiness in KGCs. The only assumption is that KGCs do not collude through sharing their secret keys. We have put this new cryptosystem into concrete encryption, signature, and authenticated key agreement schemes, and proved their security against a new adversarial model based on new underlying computational and bilinear hardness assumptions about Diffie–Hellman problem in the random oracle model. We believe that this new cryptosystem enables and ensures a secure management of multi-domain/multi-tenant 5G E2E services, even if at most (n-1) KGCs do collude.

Computation-transferable authenticated key agreement protocol for smart healthcare

Smart healthcare plays an important role in contemporary society while its security and privacy issues remain inevitable challenges. Authenticated key agreement (AKA) mechanism, as the foundation of secure communication, has been recognized as an important measure for solving this problem. Most existing AKA protocols utilize cloud-based centralized architecture, data privacy and security can be exposed easily once the centralized authority is attacked. In addition, most past solutions require the online registration center to assist mutual authentication and consume considerable amounts of resources. To address these drawbacks, a computation-transferable authenticated key agreement protocol without an online registration center for smart healthcare is designed. Specifically, the proposed protocol can realize mutual authentication and key agreement without the need for an online registration center, as well as being able to satisfy security and privacy protection requirements. By transferring partial computation tasks to the server, the proposed scheme incurs lower computation and communication overhead on the user side. Moreover, the proposed scheme adopts certificateless public key cryptography, which can solve the problems of certificate management and key escrow. Performance analysis indicates that the proposal reduces 9.9% of the computation overhead on the resource-limited terminal, which is suitable for low-power IoT applications, including smart healthcare.

Design and development of a secure certificateless proxy signature based (SE-CLPS) encryption scheme for cloud storage

Certificateless Public Key Cryptography (CL-PKC) scheme is a new standard that combines Identity (ID)-based cryptography and tradi- tional PKC. It yields better security than the ID-based cryptography scheme without requiring digital certificates. In the CL-PKC scheme, as the Key Generation Center (KGC) generates a public key using a partial secret key, the need for authenticating the public key by a trusted third party is avoided. Due to the lack of authentication, the public key associated with the private key of a user may be replaced by anyone. Therefore, the ciphertext cannot be decrypted accurately. To mitigate this issue, an Enhanced Certificateless Proxy Signature (E-CLPS) is proposed to offer high security guarantee and requires minimum computational cost. In this work, the Hackman tool is used for detecting the dictionary attacks in the cloud. From the experimental analysis, it is observed that the proposed E-CLPS scheme yields better Attack Detection Rate, True Positive Rate, True Negative Rate and Minimum False Positives and False Negatives than the existing schemes.

Cryptanalysis and improvement of a new certificateless signature scheme in the standard model

Digital signature, as an important cryptographic primitive, has been widely used in many application scenarios, such as e-commerce, authentication, cloud computing, and so on. Certificateless Public Key Cryptography (PKC) can get rid of the certificate management problem in the traditional Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) and eliminate the key-escrow problem in the identity-based PKC. Lately, a new Certificateless Signature (CLS) scheme has been proposed by Kyung-Ah Shim (IEEE SYSTEMS JOURNAL, 2018, 13(2)), which claimed to achieve provable security in the standard model. Unfortunately, we present a concrete attack to demonstrate that the scheme cannot defend against the Type I adversary. In this type of attack, the adversary can replace the public key of the signer, and then he plays the role of the signer to forge a legal certificateless signature on any message. Furthermore, we give an improved CLS scheme to resist such an attack. In terms of the efficiency and the signature length, the improved CLS is preferable to the original scheme and some recently proposed CLS schemes in the case of precomputation.

Secure Data Deduplication Protocol for Edge-Assisted Mobile CrowdSensing Services

Data deduplication for edge-based mobile crowdsensing services removes duplicate data to minimize storage space and enhance communication efficiency. However, secure data deduplication in edge-based mobile crowdsensing applications can be challenging to achieve in concurrent with protecting sensing data and participants (e.g., client and recruited mobile users) from various threats (i.e., inside attacks and outside attacks). In this paper, we propose an efficient and secure data deduplication protocol for edge-assisted mobile crowdsensing services. Specifically, certificateless public key cryptography is first employed to generate the private and public keys of the crowdsensing server center and edge nodes. Then, a novel method is created to detect and eliminate duplicates while preventing the duplicate-linking from being leaked. Next, we demonstrate that the presented scheme achieves both privacy and security attributes typically required of mobile crowdsening applications. Finally, the performance analysis shows that the proposed protocol incurs minimal computation and communication costs compared with the state of the art research.

A new provable hierarchical anonymous certificateless authentication protocol with aggregate verification in ADS-B systems

Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B) technology is a new solution for communication among aircraft and ground controller stations. In this new surveillance technology, critical messages (e.g., the location of aircraft) are achieved by navigation satellites, and then an on-board equipment multicasts the unencrypted messages twice per second to the others. The former ADS-B protocols suffer from weak authentication protocols with a few security vulnerabilities and privacy issues including key-escrow problem, user profiling, time consuming verification processes, and difficulties with certificate management. In this paper, we propose a new hierarchical authentication protocol used Certificateless Public Key Cryptography (CL-PKC) technique to avoid using Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) certificate management and solve the key-escrow concern in Identity-based Public Key Cryptography (ID-PKC). Further, unlike many of certificateless schemes, our proposed scheme is secure against malicious-but-passive Key Generation Center (KGC). We prove that our scheme preserves conditional privacy, which means that distinct identities map to varied pseudonyms. The security and privacy features of our scheme are provably modeled under the widely-accepted random oracle model by computational Diffie-Hellman (CDH) assumption against adaptive chosen-message attack. Finally, we show that the time needed to aggregate verification of 50 messages reduced by 84% and 48% compared to those of Yang et al.’s and He et al.’s schemes respectively.

A Provably Secure and Practical PUF-Based End-to-End Mutual Authentication and Key Exchange Protocol for IoT

Device authentication and key exchange are essential issues for Internet of Things (IoT) which plays an indispensable role in modern life. Many sensor devices in IoT, with limited resources and poor self-protection capabilities, are deployed in the unattended and open places, making them vulnerable to physical attacks while facing traditional security threats. Despite several researches have been conducted by using the physical unclonable function (PUF) to immune the communication between IoT devices from the security threats above, as per the knowledge of the authors, current solutions rely on the participation of the server to distribute the key parameters, which requires high message overhead and markedly influences the efficiency. To fill this gap, this article proposes an end-to-end mutual authentication and key exchange protocol for IoT by combining PUF with certificateless public key cryptography (CL-PKC) on elliptic curve, which only needs “three handshakes” without the real-time participation of the server. The security analysis shows that the proposed protocol can not only secure the IoT devices from various attacks, but also provide perfect forward secrecy. Moreover, the experimental validation and performance analysis show the proposed protocol outperforms existing related protocols in terms of security features, protocol rounds and communication cost.

A Lightweight Authentication and Key Agreement Schemes for IoT Environments.

In the Internet of Things (IoT) environment, more types of devices than ever before are connected to the internet to provide IoT services. Smart devices are becoming more intelligent and improving performance, but there are devices with little computing power and low storage capacity. Devices with limited resources will have difficulty applying existing public key cryptography systems to provide security. Therefore, communication protocols for various kinds of participating devices should be applicable in the IoT environment, and these protocols should be lightened for resources-restricted devices. Security is an essential element in the IoT environment, so for secure communication, it is necessary to perform authentication between the communication objects and to generate the session key. In this paper, we propose two kinds of lightweight authentication and key agreement schemes to enable fast and secure authentication among the objects participating in the IoT environment. The first scheme is an authentication and key agreement scheme with limited resource devices that can use the elliptic curve Qu–Vanstone (ECQV) implicit certificate to quickly agree on the session key. The second scheme is also an authentication and key agreement scheme that can be used more securely, but slower than first scheme using certificateless public key cryptography (CL-PKC). In addition, we compare and analyze existing schemes and propose new schemes to improve security requirements that were not satisfactory.

A Certificateless Aggregate Arbitrated Signature Scheme for IoT Environments.

The Internet of Things (IoT) environment consists of numerous devices. In general, IoT devices communicate with each other to exchange data, or connect to the Internet through a gateway to provide IoT services. Most IoT devices participating in the IoT service are lightweight devices, in which the existing cryptographic algorithm cannot be applied to provide security, so a more lightweight security algorithm must be applied. Cryptographic technologies to lighten and provide efficiency for IoT environments are currently being studied a lot. In particular, it is necessary to provide efficiency for computation at a gateway, a point where many devices are connected. Additionally, as many devices are connected, data authentication and integrity should be fully considered at the same time, and thus digital signature schemes have been proposed. Among the recently studied signature algorithms, the certificateless signature (CLS) based on certificateless public key cryptography (CL-PKC) provides efficiency compared to existing public key-based signatures. However, in CLS, security threats, such as public key replacement attacks and signature forgery by the malicious key generation center (KGC), may occur. In this paper, we propose a new signature scheme using CL-PKC in generating and verifying the signature of a message in an IoT environment. The proposed scheme is a certificateless aggregate arbitrated signature, and the gateway aggregates the signatures of messages generated by the device group to reduce the size of the entire signature. In addition, it is designed to be safe from security threats by solving the problems caused by public key replacement attacks and malicious KGC, and adding arbitrated signatures of the gateway to strengthen non-repudiation.

A Secure Group-Oriented Device-to-Device Authentication Protocol for 5G Wireless Networks

With the rising demand for the digital world and the emergence of new application scenarios, 5G wireless networks have become the key enabler of a new era. As one of the promising technologies, group-oriented device-to-device (D2D) communications are expected to improve spectral efficiency and reduce latency. However, to negotiate a group session key securely and effectively has become an urgent problem. In this paper, we propose an authentication and key agreement protocol, which merges the advantages of certificateless public key cryptography (CL-PKC) and elliptic curve cryptography (ECC), to guarantee secure and anonymous D2D group communications in 5G cellular networks. The security evaluation by using the Burrows-Abadi-Needham logic (BAN Logic) and the Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications (AVISPA) shows that the security goal can be achieved. Furthermore, based on extensive simulation experiments, we evaluate the performance of the proposed solution in terms of computational costs, communication costs, and energy costs. The results demonstrate that the proposal is lightweight and efficient.