Paper 2011/542

Certificate-Based Signcryption: Security Model and Efficient Construction

Yang Lu and Jiguo Li

Abstract

Signcryption is an important cryptographic primitive that simultaneously achieves confidentiality and authentication in an efficient manner. In 2008, Luo et al. introduced the notion of certificate-based signcryption and proposed the first construction of certificate-based signcryption. However, their scheme is insecure under the key replacement attack and also does not provide insider security. To overcome these disadvantages, we introduce a strengthened security model of certificate-based signcryption in this paper. The new security model accurately models insider security and the key replacement attacks that might be attempted by an adversary in a real certificate-based signcryption system. We also propose a new certificate-based signcryption scheme that reaches insider security and resists key replacement attacks. We show that this scheme is both chosen-ciphertext secure and existentially unforgeable in the random oracle model. Furthermore, performance analysis shows that the proposed scheme is efficient and practical.