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How to construct identity-based signatures without the key escrow problem

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Abstract

The inherent key escrow problem is one of the main reasons for the slow adoption of identity-based cryptography. The existing solution for mitigating the key escrow problem is by adopting multiple Private Key Generators (PKGs). Recently, there was a proposal that attempted to reduce the trust of the PKG by allowing a malicious PKG to be caught if he reveals the user’s identity-based private key illegally. Nonetheless, the proposal does not consider that the PKG can simply decrypt the ciphertext instead of revealing the private key itself (in the case of identity-based encryption schemes). The aim of this paper is to present an escrow-free identity-based signature (IBS) scheme, in which the malicious PKG will be caught if it releases a signature on behalf of the user but signed by itself. We present a formal model to capture such a scheme and provide a concrete construction.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Centre for Computer and Information Security Research, School of Computer Science and Software Engineering, University of Wollongong, Wollongong, NSW, Australia

    Tsz Hon Yuen, Willy Susilo & Yi Mu

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  1. Tsz Hon Yuen
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  2. Willy Susilo
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  3. Yi Mu
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Correspondence to Tsz Hon Yuen.

Additional information

This is an extended version of the paper in [24]. We improve the notations in the security model in [24]. We give some generic conversions between the escrow-free identity-based signatures and other cryptographic primitives in Sect. 8.

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Yuen, T.H., Susilo, W. & Mu, Y. How to construct identity-based signatures without the key escrow problem. Int. J. Inf. Secur. 9, 297–311 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10207-010-0110-5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10207-010-0110-5

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