Paper 2009/144

On the security of Identity Based Ring Signcryption Schemes

S. Sharmila Deva Selvi, S. Sree Vivek, and C. Pandu Rangan

Abstract

Signcryption is a cryptographic primitive which offers authentication and confidentiality simultaneously with a cost lower than signing and encrypting the message independently. Ring signcryption enables a user to signcrypt a message along with the identities of a set of potential senders (that includes him) without revealing which user in the set has actually produced the signcryption. Thus a ring signcrypted message has anonymity in addition to authentication and confidentiality. Ring signcryption schemes have no group managers, no setup procedures, no revocation procedures and no coordination: any user can choose any set of users (ring), that includes himself and signcrypt any message by using his private and public key as well as other users (in the ring) public keys, without getting any approval or assistance from them. Ring Signcryption is useful for leaking trustworthy secrets in an anonymous, authenticated and confidential way. \medskip To the best of our knowledge, seven identity based ring signcryption schemes are reported in the literature. Two of them were already proved to be insecure in \cite{ZBSW08} and \cite{SSP09}. In this paper, we show that four among the remaining five schemes do not provide confidentiality, to be specific, two schemes are not secure against chosen plaintext attack and other two schemes do not provide adaptive chosen ciphertext security. We then propose a new scheme and formally prove the security of the new scheme in the random oracle model. A comparison of our scheme with the only existing correct scheme by Huang et al. shows that our scheme is much more efficient than the scheme by Huang et al.