Paper 2010/376

Identity Based Online/Offline Signcryption Scheme

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

Abstract

Online/Offline signcryption is a cryptographic primitive where the signcryption process is divided into two phases - online and offline phase. Most of the computations are carried out offline (where the message and the receiver identity are unavailable). The online phase does not require any heavy computations like pairing, multiplication on elliptic curves and is very efficient. To the best of our knowledge there exists three online/offline signcryption schemes in the literature : we propose various attacks on all the existing schemes. Then, we give the first efficient and provably secure identity based online/offline signcryption scheme. We formally prove the security of the new scheme in the random oracle model \cite{BellareR93}. The main advantage of the new scheme is, it does not require the knowledge of message or receiver during the offline phase. This property is very useful since it is not required to pre-compute offline signcryption for different receivers based on the anticipated receivers during the offline phase. Hence, any value generated during the offline phase can be used during the online phase to signcrypt the message to a receiver during the online phase. This helps in reducing the number of values stored during the offline phase. To the best of our knowledge, the scheme in this paper is the first provably secure scheme with this property.