Paper 2010/343

Identity Based Public Verifiable Signcryption Scheme

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

Abstract

Signcryption as a single cryptographic primitive offers both confidentiality and authentication simultaneously. Generally in signcryption schemes, the message is hidden and thus the validity of the ciphertext can be verified only after unsigncrypting the ciphertext. Thus, a third party will not be able to verify whether the ciphertext is valid or not. Signcryption schemes that allow any user to verify the validity of the ciphertext without the knowledge of the message are called public verifiable signcryption schemes. Third Party verifiable signcryption schemes allow the receiver to convince a third party, by providing some additional information along with the signcryption other than his private key with/without exposing the message. In this paper, we show the security weaknesses in three existing schemes \cite{BaoD98}, \cite{TsoOO08} and \cite{ChowYHC03}. The schemes in \cite{BaoD98} and \cite{TsoOO08} are in the Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) setting and the scheme in \cite{ChowYHC03} is in the identity based setting. More specifically, \cite{TsoOO08} is based on elliptic curve digital signature algorithm (ECDSA). We also, provide a new identity based signcryption scheme that provides public verifiability and third party verification. We formally prove the security of the newly proposed scheme in the random oracle model.