A study on provably secure authentication schemes from bilinear pairings

Abstract

Authentication is one of the most important requirements which all information security objectives and authentication mechanism is very essential component in many applications. Before 1970s, authentication is considered to be a part of secrecy. With the invention of public key cryptography, in particular digital signatures, authentication become a separate security objective. In general, authentication can be divided into two categories: data authentication and entity authentication. Data authentication provides assurance of the origin of documents while entity authentication validates the identity of the entities. Digital signatures are essential primitives offering data authentication. Expending on application requirements, there are various types of digital signatures such as blind signatures, forward secure signatures, proxy signatures, etc. On the other hand, in order to verify an identity of a user, entity authentication relies on authentication targets. Such targets an be a password (the things the user knows), security token (the things the user has), or biometric identifier (the things the user is). This thesis studies authentication techniques including data and entity authentication. In a study on data authentication, we focus on the forward secure signatures, a type of digital signatures coping with the key exposure problem. Traditional forward secure signatures require to define the life time of the schemes as an input parameter. Consequently, not only the operation period of the schemes is limited but also the complexity and performance of the schemes depend completely on this parameter. The larger the value of the life time is, the lower the performance f the schemes. We have proposed yet another forward secure signature based on bilinear pairings to overcome this drawback of traditional forward secure signature scheme. Our construction is the first one which requires the general security parameters only independent to the life time of the sch...