A Forward-Secure Certificate-Based Signature Scheme with Enhanced Security in the Standard Model

Abstract

Leakage of secret keys may be the most devastating problem in public key cryptosystems because it means that all security guarantees are missing. The forward security mechanism allows users to update secret keys frequently without updating public keys. Meanwhile, it ensures that an attacker is unable to derive a user's secret keys for any past time, even if it compromises the user's current secret key. Therefore, it offers an effective cryptographic approach to address the private key leakage problem. As an extension of the forward security mechanism in certificate-based public key cryptography, forward-secure certificate-based signature (FS-CBS) has many appealing merits, such as no key escrow, no secure channel and implicit authentication. Until now, there is only one FS-CBS scheme that does not employ the random oracles. Unfortunately, our cryptanalysis indicates that the scheme is subject to the security vulnerability due to the existential forgery attack from the malicious CA. Our attack demonstrates that a CA can destroy its existential unforgeability by implanting trapdoors in system parameters without knowing the target user's secret key. Therefore, it is fair to say that to design a FS-CBS scheme secure against malicious CAs without lying random oracles is still an unsolved issue. To address this problem, we put forward an enhanced FS-CBS scheme without random oracles. Our FS-CBS scheme not only fixes the security weakness in the original scheme, but also significantly optimizes the scheme efficiency. In the standard model, we formally prove its security under the complexity assumption of the square computational Diffie-Hellman problem. In addition, the comparison with the original FS-CBS scheme shows that our scheme offers stronger security guarantee and enjoys better performance.