Informatica

Due to the popularity of mobile communication, many computing devices are exposed to remote environments without physical protection so that these devices easily suffer from leakage attacks (e.g., side-channel attacks). Under such leakage attacks, when a computing device performs some cryptographic algorithm, an adversary may acquire partial bits of secret keys participated in this cryptographic algorithm. To resist leakage attacks, researchers offer leakage-resilient cryptography as a solution. A signcryption scheme combines signing and encrypting processes to simultaneously provide both authentication and confidentiality, which is an important cryptographic primitive. Indeed, many leakage-resilient signcryption schemes under various public key system (PKS) settings were proposed. Unfortunately, these schemes still have two shortcomings, namely, bounded leakage resilience and conditionally continuous leakage resilience. In this paper, a “fully” continuous leakage-resilient certificate-based signcryption (FCLR-CBSC) scheme is proposed. Security analysis is formally proved to show that our scheme possesses both authentication and confidentiality against two types of adversaries in the certificate-based PKS setting. Performance analysis and simulation experience show that our scheme is suited to run on both a PC and a mobile device.

Anonymous multi-recipient signcryption (AMRS) is an important scheme of public-key cryptography (PKC) and applied for many modern digital applications. In an AMRS scheme, a broadcast management centre (BMC) may sign and encrypt a plaintext data (or file) to a set of multiple recipients. Meanwhile, only these recipients in the set can decrypt the plaintext data and authenticate the BMC while offering anonymity of their identities. In the past, some AMRS schemes based on various PKCs have been proposed. Recently, due to side-channel attacks, the existing cryptographic mechanisms could be broken so that leakage-resilient PKC resisting such attacks has attracted the attention of cryptographic researches. However, the work on the design of leakage-resilient AMRS (LR-AMRS) schemes is little and only suitable for multiple recipients under a single PKC. In this paper, the first leakage-resilient and seamlessly compatible AMRS (LRSC-AMRS) in heterogeneous PKCs is proposed. In the proposed scheme, multiple recipients can be members of two heterogeneous PKCs, namely, the public-key infrastructure PKC (PKI-PKC) or the certificateless PKC (CL-PKC). Also, we present a seamlessly compatible upgradation procedure from the PKI-PKC to the CL-PKC. The proposed scheme achieves three security properties under side-channel attacks, namely, encryption confidentiality, recipient anonymity and sender (i.e. BMC) authentication, which are formally shown by the associated security theorems. Finally, by comparing with related schemes, it is shown that the proposed LRSC-AMRS scheme is suitable for heterogeneous recipients and the computational cost of each recipient’s unsigncryption algorithm is constant $O(1)$.

Signcryption integrates both signature and encryption schemes into single scheme to ensure both content unforgeability (authentication) and message confidentiality while reducing computational complexity. Typically, both signers (senders) and decrypters (receivers) in a signcryption scheme belong to the same public-key systems. When signers and decrypters in a signcryption scheme belong to heterogeneous public-key systems, this scheme is called a hybrid signcryption scheme which provides more elastic usage than typical signcryption schemes. In recent years, a new kind of attack, named side-channel attack, allows adversaries to learn a portion of the secret keys used in cryptographic algorithms. To resist such an attack, leakage-resilient cryptography has been widely discussed and studied while a large number of leakage-resilient schemes have been proposed. Also, numerous hybrid signcryption schemes under heterogeneous public-key systems were proposed, but none of them possesses leakage-resilient property. In this paper, we propose the first hybrid signcryption scheme with leakage resilience, called leakage-resilient hybrid signcryption scheme, in heterogeneous public-key systems (LR-HSC-HPKS). Security proofs are demonstrated to show that the proposed scheme provides both authentication and confidentiality against two types of adversaries in heterogeneous public-key systems.

To resolve both certificate management and key escrow problems, a certificateless public-key system (CLPKS) has been proposed. However, a CLPKS setting must provide a revocation mechanism to revoke compromised users. Thus, a revocable certificateless public-key system (RCLPKS) was presented to address the revocation issue and, in such a system, the key generation centre (KGC) is responsible to run this revocation functionality. Furthermore, a RCLPKS setting with an outsourced revocation authority (ORA), named RCLPKS-ORA setting, was proposed to employ the ORA to alleviate the KGC’s computational burden. Very recently it was noticed that adversaries may adopt side-channel attacks to threaten these existing conventional public-key systems (including CLPKS, RCLPKS and RCLPKS-ORA). Fortunately, leakage-resilient cryptography offers a solution to resist such attacks. In this article, the first leakage-resilient revocable certificateless encryption scheme with an ORA, termed LR-RCLE-ORA scheme, is proposed. The proposed scheme is formally shown to be semantically secure against three types of adversaries in the RCLPKS and RCLPKS-ORA settings while resisting side-channel attacks. In the proposed scheme, adversaries are allowed to continually extract partial ingredients of secret keys participated in various computational algorithms of the proposed scheme while retaining its security.

Very recently, side-channel attacks have threatened all traditional cryptographic schemes. Typically, in traditional cryptography, private/secret keys are assumed to be completely hidden to adversaries. However, by side-channel attacks, an adversary may extract fractional content of these private/secret keys. To resist side-channel attacks, leakage-resilient cryptography is a countermeasure. Identity-based public-key system (ID-PKS) is an attractive public-key setting. ID-PKS settings not only discard the certificate requirement, but also remove the construction of the public-key infrastructure. For solving the user revocation problem in ID-PKS settings, revocable ID-PKS (RID-PKS) setting has attracted significant attention. Numerous cryptographic schemes based on RID-PKS settings have been proposed. However, under RID-PKS settings, no leakage-resilient signature or encryption scheme is proposed. In this article, we present the first leakage-resilient revocable ID-based signature (LR-RIBS) scheme with cloud revocation authority (CRA) under the continual leakage model. Also, a new adversary model of LR-RIBS schemes with CRA is defined. Under this new adversary model, security analysis is made to demonstrate that our LR-RIBS scheme with CRA is provably secure in the generic bilinear group (GBG) model. Finally, performance analysis is made to demonstrate that our scheme is suitable for mobile devices.

After Morris and Thompson wrote the first paper on password security in 1979, strict password policies have been enforced to make sure users follow the rules on passwords. Many such policies require users to select and use a system-generated password. The objective of this paper is to analyse the effectiveness of strict password management policies with respect to how users remember system-generated passwords of different textual types – plaintext strings, passphrases, and hybrid graphical-textual PsychoPass passwords. In an experiment, participants were assigned a random string, passphrase, and PsychoPass passwords and had to memorize them. Surprisingly, no one has remembered either the random string or the passphrase, whereas only 10% of the participants remembered their PsychoPass password. The policies where administrators let systems assign passwords to users are not appropriate. Although PsychoPass passwords are easier to remember, the recall rate of any system-assigned password is below the acceptable level. The findings of this study explain that system-assigned strong passwords are inappropriate and put unacceptable memory burden on users.