Signature Delegation Research Articles

A privacy-enhanced OAuth 2.0 based protocol for Smart City mobile applications

In the forthcoming Smart City scenario, Service Providers will require users to authenticate themselves and authorize their mobile applications to access their remote accounts. In this scenario, OAuth 2.0 has been widely adopted as a de facto authentication and authorization protocol. However, the current OAuth 2.0 protocol specification does not consider the user privacy issue and presents several vulnerabilities that can jeopardize users' privacy rights. Therefore, in this paper we propose an OAuth 2.0 based protocol for Smart City mobile applications that addresses the user privacy issue by integrating a pseudonym-based signature scheme and a signature delegation scheme into the OAuth 2.0 protocol flow. The proposed solution allows users to self-generate user-specific and app-specific pseudonyms on-demand and ensure privacy-enhanced user authentication at the Service Provider side. The proposed protocol has been validated with Proverif and its performance has been evaluated in terms of time and space complexity. Results show that the proposed protocol can provide users with efficient and effective means to authenticate towards service providers while preventing user tracking and impersonation from malicious entities located in the network side or in the users' mobile device.

Identity‐based schemes for a secured big data and cloud ICT framework in smart grid system

AbstractSmart grid is an intelligent cyber physical system (CPS). The CPS generates a massive amount of data for efficient grid operation. In this paper, a big data‐driven, cloud‐based information and communication technology (ICT) framework for smart grid CPS is proposed. The proposed ICT framework deploys hybrid cloud servers to enhance scalability and reliability of smart grid communication infrastructure. Because the data in the ICT framework contains much privacy of customers and important data for automated controlling, the security of data transmission must be ensured. In order to secure the communications over the Internet in the system, identity‐based schemes are proposed especially because of their advantage in key management. Specifically, an identity‐based signcryption (IBSC) scheme is proposed to provide confidentiality, non‐repudiation, and data integrity. For practical purposes, an identity‐based signature scheme is relaxed from the proposed IBSC to provide non‐repudiation only. Moreover, identity‐based schemes are also proposed to achieve signature delegation within the ICT framework. Security of the proposed IBSC scheme is rigorously analyzed in this work. Efficiency of the proposed IBSC scheme is demonstrated with an implementation using modified Weil pairing over an elliptic curve. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The biometric signature delegation scheme to balance the load of digital signing in hybrid P2P networks

With the wide spread use of smart phones and high-speed networks, the demands for video contents are growing rapidly, for which broad bandwidth is needed. Generally, the client–server model is used to stream video contents to customers. The downside is that the server can be overloaded if the traffic is converged to popular content. In P2P protocol, the client can act as a server, thus the load of the server can be distributed. But, P2P protocol cannot discriminate whether seeders have legal rights of distribution of paid contents. Thus, unsubscribed users can access and play the paid contents. There are too many seeders to apply the server policies, and the seeders are able to join or leave the network autonomically. Thus, for contents business, a hybrid P2P model seems to be best to apply by allowing the index server for management and the seeders for contents distribution. It’s necessary to use PKI certificates to authenticate the seeders to bind them to have legal right of distribution. However, in this case, if seeders are growing rapidly, the work load of PKI authentication may be increased too. The PKI is a static structure where trustful CAs are made by government policy. It’s not easy to reflect the status of dynamic seeder groups, the number of seeders whom the PKI authentication needed is unpredictable and the process of certificate based signing is complex. In addition, the seeder who has not certificate cannot participate in contents distribution. Biometric based signing can replace the role of PKI based signing, as the biometric key is only bound to a specific person, thus the key itself has legal binding forces. We focus on how to stream video contents with safety and efficiency in the hybrid P2P model. Firstly, only subscribed users should be able to join the contents sharing, and the sales and delivery transactions are to be operated with different protocols. Secondly, the distributed authentication is needed to alleviate the work load of signing seeders responsible for contents distribution. Thus, to decrease the traffic converged to the PKI server, in a hybrid P2P based business model, it’s preferable to apply PKI based signing to the seller, and biometric based signing to the seeders. The index server should be able to control the sales and delivery transactions in a static manner, and the seeders should be dynamically grouped and managed. If the trust relationship from the index server to the seeder is established, the trust chain, the delegate signature could be legally accepted. In this study, we propose the biometric signature delegation scheme. The proposed scheme consists of a biometric key generation, signature delegation, signature generation and verification protocols. We also show how our scheme could be applied to distribute the contents in a hybrid P2P networks.

부인봉쇄 성질을 갖는 바이오메트릭 서명 위임 기법

Abstract In a biometric signature scheme, a user’s biometric key is used to sign the document. It also requires the user be authenticated with biometric recognition method, prior to signing the document. Because the biometric recognition is launched every time the signature session started, it is not suitable for electronic commerce applications such as shopping malls where large number of documents to sign are required. Therefore, to commercialize biometric based signature schemes, the new proxy signature scheme is needed to ease the burden of the signer. In the proxy signature scheme, the signer can delegate signing activities to trustful third parties. In this study, the biometric based signature delegation method is proposed. The proposed scheme is suitable for applications where a lot of signing are required. It is consisted of biometric key generation, PKI based mutual authentication, signature generation and verification protocols. Key Words : Biometric Signature, Proxy Signature, PKI, Undeniable Property, Large Scale Authentication

A Collusion-Resistant Distributed Agent-Based Signature Delegation (CDASD) Protocol for E-Commerce Applications

Mobile agent technology is promising for e-commerce and distributed computing applications due to its properties of mobility and autonomy. One of the most security-sensitive tasks a mobile agent is expected to perform is signing digital signatures on a remote untrustworthy service host that is beyond the control of the agent host. This service host may treat the mobile agents unfairly, i.e. according to its’ own benefit rather than to their time of arrival. In this research, we present a novel protocol, called Collusion-Resistant Distributed Agent-based Signature Delegation (CDASD) protocol, to allow an agent host to delegate its signing power to an anonymous mobile agent in such a way that the mobile agent does not reveal any information about its host’s identity and, at the same time, can be authenticated by the service host, hence, ensuring fairness of service provision. The protocol introduces a verification server to verify the signature generated by the mobile agent in such a way that even if colluding with the service host, both parties will not get more information than what they already have. The protocol incorporates three methods: Agent Signature Key Generation method, Agent Signature Generation method, Agent Signature Verification method. The most notable feature of the protocol is that, in addition to allowing secure and anonymous signature delegation, it enables tracking of malicious mobile agents when a service host is attacked. The security properties of the proposed protocol are analyzed, and the protocol is compared with the most related work.

A Collusion-Resistant Distributed Signature Delegation Based on Anonymous Mobile Agent

A Collusion-Resistant Distributed Signature Delegation Based on Anonymous Mobile Agent

Reputation management and signature delegation: A distributed approach

In this paper, we present a novel protocol, called Distributed Signcryption with Verifiable Partial Signature (DiSigncryption) protocol, to allow an agent owner to securely distribute his signing capability among a set of trusted third party hosts (TTP-hosts) via a mobile agent. The protocol incorporates three schemes: a novel Distributed Reputation Management scheme, a modified version of the Distributed Signcryption method proposed in [23], and an extended version of the Agent-based Threshold Proxy Signcryption (ATPS) protocol proposed in [2]. The security properties of the proposed protocol are analyzed, and the protocol is compared with the most related work.