Identity-based Identification Research Articles

A Pairing-free Provable Secure and Efficient Identity-based Identification Scheme with Anonymity

In this paper, we propose a Blind Identity-Based Identification (Blind IBI) scheme based on the Guillou-Quisquater (GQ) scheme. Our proposed scheme combines the benefits of traditional Identity-Based Identification (IBI) schemes that can authenticate a user's identity without relying on a trusted third party with the Blind Signature (BS) scheme that provides anonymity. As a result, the proposed scheme assures absolute user privacy during the authentication process. It does not rely on a third party, yet the verifier can still be assured of the user's identity without the user actually revealing it. In our work, we show that the proposed scheme is provably secure under the random oracle model, with the assumption that the one-more-RSA-inversion problem is difficult. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the proposed scheme is secure against passive, active, and concurrent impersonation attacks. In conclusion, the proposed scheme is able to achieve the desired blindness property without compromising the security of the GQ-IBI scheme it is based upon.

ECQV-IBI: Identity-based identification with implicit certification

Identity-based identification (IBI) schemes allow a prover to provide entity identification, based on its unique identity. This paper provides the first non-trivial IBI scheme with implicit certification by using the Elliptic Curve Qu Vanstone (ECQV) implicit certification scheme. In contrast to the conventional identity-based schemes, the implicit certificate based approach is resistant against key escrow since the trusted authority only a part of the secret key, which is used as input by the user to construct its own user secret key. We show our scheme is able to achieve Trust Level 3 according to Girault’s definitions, while requiring less resources when compared to certificateless identification. A corresponding formal security model is defined, showing the resistance of our proposed scheme against impersonation attacks. Compared to other Schnorr-based IBI schemes, our proposed IBI scheme with implicit certification outperforms in storage, computation and communication efficiency and thus offers a viable solution to be applied in an internet of things (IoT) context.

A Pairing-Free Identity-Based Identification Scheme with Tight Security Using Modified-Schnorr Signatures

The security of cryptographic schemes is proven secure by reducing an attacker which breaks the scheme to an algorithm that could be used to solve the underlying hard assumption (e.g., Discrete Logarithm, Decisional Diffie–Hellman). The reduction is considered tight if it results in approximately similar probability bounds to that of solving the underlying hard assumption. Tight security is desirable as it improves security guarantees and allows the use of shorter parameters without the risk of compromising security. In this work, we propose an identity-based identification (IBI) scheme with tight security based on a variant of the Schnorr signature scheme known as TNC signatures. The proposed IBI scheme enjoys shorter parameters and key sizes as compared to existing IBI schemes without increasing the number of operations required for its identification protocol. Our scheme is suitable to be used for lightweight authentication in resource-constrained Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) as it utilizes the lowest amount of bandwidth when compared to other state-of-the-art symmetric key lightweight authentication schemes. Although it is costlier than its symmetric key counterparts in terms of operational costs due to its asymmetric key nature, it enjoys other benefits such as decentralized authentication and scalable key management. As a proof of concept to substantiate our claims, we perform an implementation of our scheme to demonstrate its speed and memory usage when it runs on both high and low-end devices.

Identity-Based Identification Scheme without Trusted Party against Concurrent Attacks

Identification schemes support that a prover who holding a secret key to prove itself to any verifier who holding the corresponding public key. In traditional identity-based identification schemes, there is a key generation center to generate all users’ secret keys. This means that the key generation center knows all users’ secret key, which brings the key escrow problem. To resolve this problem, in this work, we define the model of identity-based identification without a trusted party. Then, we propose a multi-authority identity-based identification scheme based on bilinear pairing. Furthermore, we prove the security of the proposed scheme in the random oracle model against impersonation under passive and concurrent attacks. Finally, we give an application of the proposed identity-based identification scheme to blockchain.

On the General Construction of Tightly Secure Identity-Based Signature Schemes

AbstractA tightly secure scheme has a reduction, where the reduction loss is a small constant. Identity-based signature (IBS) is an important cryptographic primitive, and tightly secure IBS schemes enjoy the advantage that the security parameter can be optimal to achieve a certain security level. General constructions of IBS schemes (Bellare, M., Namprempre, C., and Neven, G. (2004) Security Proofs for Identity-Based Identification and Signature Schemes. In Proc. EUROCRYPT 2004, May 2–6, pp. 268–286. Springer, Berlin, Interlaken, Switzerland; Galindo, D., Herranz, J., and Kiltz, E. (2006) On the Generic Construction of Identity-Based Signatures With Additional Properties. In Proceedings of ASIACRYPT 2006, December 3–7, pp. 178–193. Springer, Berlin, Shanghai, China) and their security have been extensively studied. However, the security is not tight and how to generally construct a tightly secure IBS scheme remains unknown. In this paper, we concentrate on the general constructions of IBS schemes. We first take an insight into previous constructions and analyze the reason why it cannot achieve tight security. To further study possible tightly secure constructions, we propose another general construction, which could be seen as a different framework of IBS schemes. Our construction requires two traditional signature schemes, whereas the construction by Bellare et al. uses one scheme in a two-round iteration. There are no additional operations in our general construction. Its main advantage is providing the possibility of achieving tight security for IBS schemes in the random oracle model. Combining two known signature schemes, we present an efficient IBS scheme with tight security as an example.

An Identity Based-Identification Scheme With Tight Security Against Active and Concurrent Adversaries

Identification schemes are used by machines to securely authenticate the identity of other machines or their users over computer networks. As conventional public key schemes require a trusted third party (TTP) or a public file to ensure the corresponding public key matches with the identity, identity-based cryptosystems emerged as a form of certificate-free system. The entity's identity is the public key itself, therefore eliminating the need for a TTP. The identity-based identification (IBI) scheme introduced by Kurosawa and Heng using their transform in 2004 remains as the only IBI derived from the Boneh-Lynn-Shacham (BLS) short signature scheme which has the advantage of shorter keys. We show tight security reduction against active and concurrent attackers (imp-aa/ca) on our scheme that is obtained from the same transform. As the transform will only produce schemes that are only secure against passive attackers (imp-pa), security against imp-aa/ca scheme relies on a strong One-More interactive assumption and therefore resulted in weak security. While the OR-proof method allows schemes secure against imp-pa to be secure against imp-aa/ca, the resulting security against imp-aa/ca will suffer from loose bounds in addition to the user secret keys being doubled in size. Our work avoids both OR-proof and strong interactive assumptions by showing an ad-hoc proof for our construction which utilizes the weaker well-studied co-computational Diffie-Hellman assumption and yet still has tight security against imp-aa/ca. We demonstrate the tight security of our scheme which allows usage of even shorter key sizes.

Seamless Personnel Authentication using Facial Recognition and Identity-Based Identification on Mobile Devices

Security systems for buildings are no longer an uncommon thing in daily life with increasingly complex access control systems to achieve secured building security system. Achieving a hassle-free yet secure access control systems has been always a challenge for organizations especially for those managing large buildings. In this project, we develop a prototype that utilizes a combination of biometric and cryptography based security schemes to grant access control on personnel going in and out of a building. Our development achieves two-factor authentication in one single step which provides users a seamless experience for authentication. The identity-based identification (IBI) scheme that is based on number-theoretic cryptography is implemented on mobile devices to allow the identification scheme to run in the background. A face recognition system and web server is also developed which can be deployed on any PC at the market. The novelty lies in the combination of the two, with the face recognition making potential intruders difficult to forge biometric data of honest users, and the identity-based scheme preventing the adversary to learn any secrets from the authentication process, while allowing honest users to verify themselves from face to smartphone without any user intervention, thus creating a seamless authentication experience.

Provably secure identity-based identification and signature schemes from code assumptions.

Code-based cryptography is one of few alternatives supposed to be secure in a post-quantum world. Meanwhile, identity-based identification and signature (IBI/IBS) schemes are two of the most fundamental cryptographic primitives, so several code-based IBI/IBS schemes have been proposed. However, with increasingly profound researches on coding theory, the security reduction and efficiency of such schemes have been invalidated and challenged. In this paper, we construct provably secure IBI/IBS schemes from code assumptions against impersonation under active and concurrent attacks through a provably secure code-based signature technique proposed by Preetha, Vasant and Rangan (PVR signature), and a security enhancement Or-proof technique. We also present the parallel-PVR technique to decrease parameter values while maintaining the standard security level. Compared to other code-based IBI/IBS schemes, our schemes achieve not only preferable public parameter size, private key size, communication cost and signature length due to better parameter choices, but also provably secure.

Authentication Mechanisms in a Control Grid Computing Environment Using Identity Based Identification (IBI)

Highly critical authentication in Grid Computing systems required secured data transmission to be protected from unintended user and free modification. The process of protecting data from unauthorized user known as cryptography while protecting the user data from modification can be achieved through verification process. However, most of the grid computing system is still using public key infrastructure (PKI) as an industry standard and certificate authority (CA) server to authenticate users to access the grid resources. Several works have been done enhancing RSA algorithm for grid authentication computing system. Though, none of the work has addressed specifically how to avoid the vulnerability. This paper proposed an alternative authentication mechanism using Identity based Identification (IBI) algorithm with a verification process to ensure the user identification, and carry out the experiment in the GridSim toolkit simulator.

IBI-Mobile Authentication: A Prototype to Facilitate Access Control Using Identity-Based Identification on Mobile Smart Devices

In large organizations, handling personnel authorization for access to various sites within the building has always proved to be a challenge for security departments. In this work, we develop a prototype that utilizes an identity-based identification scheme to provide access control for incoming and outgoing personnel from the building, as well as their activities within. Our prototype is built using open-source web technology as well as mobile app support for personal smart phones. The novelty lies in the application of an identity-based identification scheme as a crucial component to ensure that no third party malicious observers, or even observers disguised as honest users trying to break the system, will be able to learn anything about the authentication processes of other users. We also reveal the running time for our various mobile applications for both the registration and identification process and show that they are competitive to that of previous work done in identity-based identification simulation experiments in the past. Lastly, as proof of concept, we demonstrate our prototype with a Nuvton electromagnetic door lock that communicates with the verification process on the server.

Twin-Beth: Security under active and concurrent attacks for the beth identity-based identification scheme

In 2004, Bellare et al. formalized the notion for identity-based identification (IBI) schemes and proposed many schemes based on their transformation from standard identification schemes. However the authors left the security under active/concurrent attacks of one of the pairing-free schemes, the Beth-IBI scheme, as an open problem. In 2008, Crescenzo provided the solution to this open problem with a small modification to the original Beth-IBI scheme. However, recently Chin et al. pointed out security flaws in Crescenzo's modified Beth-IBI scheme, resulting in total break of the scheme and leaving Bellare et al's open problem unanswered once more. In this paper, we provide a solution to the open problem, showing that with only some additional overhead to modify the original Beth-IBI scheme we can achieve security against active and concurrent attacks. Furthermore, our security guarantee results are superior to Crescenzo's attempt in that we rely only on the classical discrete-logarithm assumption for our active and concurrent security proof, which is a weaker assumption than Crescenzo's one-more counterpart.

Twin-Schnorr: a security upgrade for the Schnorr identity-based identification scheme.

Most identity-based identification (IBI) schemes proposed in recent literature are built using pairing operations. This decreases efficiency due to the high operation costs of pairings. Furthermore, most of these IBI schemes are proven to be secure against impersonation under active and concurrent attacks using interactive assumptions such as the one-more RSA inversion assumption or the one-more discrete logarithm assumption, translating to weaker security guarantees due to the interactive nature of these assumptions. The Schnorr-IBI scheme was first proposed through the Kurosawa-Heng transformation from the Schnorr signature. It remains one of the fastest yet most secure IBI schemes under impersonation against passive attacks due to its pairing-free design. However, when required to be secure against impersonators under active and concurrent attacks, it deteriorates greatly in terms of efficiency due to the protocol having to be repeated multiple times. In this paper, we upgrade the Schnorr-IBI scheme to be secure against impersonation under active and concurrent attacks using only the classical discrete logarithm assumption. This translates to a higher degree of security guarantee with only some minor increments in operational costs. Furthermore, because the scheme operates without pairings, it still retains its efficiency and superiority when compared to other pairing-based IBI schemes.

A provable secure pairing-free certificateless identification scheme

Certificateless identification (CLI) schemes offer an alternative solution to the certificate management problem of traditional identification schemes, as well as remove the key escrow from key generation, an inherent property of identity-based identification. In this paper, we provide a pairing-free CLI scheme, provable secure against passive and active/concurrent attacks for both Type-1 and Type-2 adversaries. This shows that our scheme is computationally efficient because no bilinear pairings are involved.

Efficient and provable secure pairing-free security-mediated identity-based identification schemes.

Security-mediated cryptography was first introduced by Boneh et al. in 2001. The main motivation behind security-mediated cryptography was the capability to allow instant revocation of a user's secret key by necessitating the cooperation of a security mediator in any given transaction. Subsequently in 2003, Boneh et al. showed how to convert a RSA-based security-mediated encryption scheme from a traditional public key setting to an identity-based one, where certificates would no longer be required. Following these two pioneering papers, other cryptographic primitives that utilize a security-mediated approach began to surface. However, the security-mediated identity-based identification scheme (SM-IBI) was not introduced until Chin et al. in 2013 with a scheme built on bilinear pairings. In this paper, we improve on the efficiency results for SM-IBI schemes by proposing two schemes that are pairing-free and are based on well-studied complexity assumptions: the RSA and discrete logarithm assumptions.

Secure Hierarchical Identity-Based Identification without Random Oracles

This paper proposes a generic construction of hierarchical identity-based identification (HIBI) protocols secure against impersonation under active and concurrent attacks in the standard model. The proposed construction converts a digital signature scheme existentially unforgeable against chosen message attacks, where the scheme has a protocol for showing possession of signing key. Our construction is based on the so-called certificate-based construction of hierarchical identity-based cryptosystems, and utilizes a variant of the well-known OR-proof technique to ensure the security against impersonation under active and concurrent attacks. We also present several concrete examples of our construction employing the Waters signature (EUROCRYPT 2005), and other signatures. As results, its concurrent security of each instantiation is proved under the computational Diffie-Hellman (CDH) assumption, the RSA assumption, or their variants in the standard model. Chin, Heng, and Goi proposed an HIBI protocol passively and concurrently secure under the CDH and one-more CDH assumption, respectively (FGIT-SecTech 2009). However, its security is proved in the random oracle model.

Identity based identification from algebraic coding theory

Cryptographic identification schemes allow a remote user to prove his/her identity to a verifier who holds some public information of the user, such as the user public key or identity. Most of the existing cryptographic identification schemes are based on number-theoretic hard problems such as Discrete Log and Factorization. This paper focuses on the design and analysis of identity based identification (IBI) schemes based on algebraic coding theory. We first revisit an existing code-based IBI scheme which is derived by combining the Courtois–Finiasz–Sendrier signature scheme and the Stern zero-knowledge identification scheme. Previous results have shown that this IBI scheme is secure under passive attacks. In this paper, we prove that the scheme in fact can resist active attacks. However, whether the scheme can be proven secure under concurrent attacks (the most powerful attacks against identification schemes) remains open. In addition, we show that it is difficult to apply the conventional OR-proof approach to this particular IBI scheme in order to obtain concurrent security. We then construct a special OR-proof variant of this scheme and prove that the resulting IBI scheme is secure under concurrent attacks.

On the security of a modified Beth identity-based identification scheme

In their seminal work for identity-based identification (IBI) schemes in 2004, Bellare et al. left open the question of whether the Beth identification scheme, and consequently the derived IBI scheme, can be proven secure against active and concurrent attackers. In 2008, Crescenzo answered the question in the positive by presenting a modified version of the Beth identification scheme as well as the corresponding derived IBI scheme. In this paper, we show that while the modified version of the Beth identification scheme proposed by Crescenzo is secure, an attack exists on the corresponding Beth-IBI scheme.

An Improved Efficient Provable Secure Identity-Based Identification Scheme in the Standard Model

In 2008, Chin et al. proposed an efficient and provable secure identity-based identification scheme in the standard model. However, we discovered a subtle flaw in the security proof which renders the proof of security useless. While no weakness has been found in the scheme itself, a scheme that is desired would be one with an accompanying proof of security. In this paper, we provide a fix to the scheme to overcome the problem without affecting the efficiency as well as a new proof of security. In particular, we show that only one extra pre-computable pairing operation should be added into the commitment phase of the identification protocol to fix the proof of security under the same hard problems.

Security Proofs for Identity-Based Identification and Signature Schemes

This paper provides either security proofs or attacks for a large number of identity-based identification and signature schemes defined either explicitly or implicitly in existing literature. Underlying these is a framework that on the one hand helps explain how these schemes are derived and on the other hand enables modular security analyses, thereby helping to understand, simplify, and unify previous work. We also analyze a generic folklore construction that in particular yields identity-based identification and signature schemes without random oracles.

A new framework for the design and analysis of identity-based identification schemes

Constructing an identification scheme is one of the fundamental problems in cryptography, and is very useful in practice. An identity-based identification (IBI) scheme allows a prover to identify himself to a public verifier who knows only the claimed identity of the prover and some public information. In this paper, we propose a new framework for both the design and analysis of IBI schemes. Our approach works in an engineering way. We first identify an IBI scheme as the composition of two building blocks, and then show that, with different security properties of these building blocks, the corresponding IBI schemes can achieve security against impersonation under different levels of attacks, namely, passive attack ( id-imp-pa), active attack ( id-imp-aa) or concurrent attack ( id-imp-ca). In particular, we show that an id-imp-pa secure IBI scheme can be built if there exists a trapdoor weak-one-more relation and an honest verifier zero-knowledge proof with special soundness, while an id-imp-aa and id-imp-ca secure IBI scheme can be built if there exists a trapdoor strong-one-more relation and a Witness Dualism proof with Special Soundness (WD-SS). This new framework can capture IBI construction techniques that are not captured by other known frameworks. It also helps to construct new and efficient schemes. We demonstrate this by proposing two new IBI schemes, one achieving id-imp-pa, and the other one achieving both id-imp-aa and id-imp-ca, and neither of them can be captured by existing frameworks.