Title: On the security of a strong provably secure identity-based encryption scheme without bilinear pairing

Authors: Li Li; Jong-Hyouk Lee

Addresses: School of International Software, Wuhan University, Wuhan, China ' Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Sangmyung University, Cheonan, Korea

Abstract: The identity-based encryption scheme enables a sender to generate the ciphertext using a receiver's identity and system's parameters. Because of its convenience, the identity-based encryption scheme has been widely used in many practical applications. Recently, Zheng et al. proposed a new identity-based encryption scheme that operates without bilinear pairing. The authors claimed that their proposed scheme is provably secure in the standard model. However, in this paper, we show that Zheng et al.'s scheme unfortunately suffers from the key comprise problem, i.e., malicious users can deduce the private key of the key generation centre (KGC) through a coalition attack. Subsequently, the adversary can deduce any user's private key with the derived private key of the KGC. Our security analysis confirms that their scheme is not suitable for practical applications.

Keywords: identity-based encryption; IBE; standard model; provable security; bilinear pairing; cryptography; private keys; key generation centre; KGC; coalition attacks; security analysis.

DOI: 10.1504/IJITST.2016.080393

International Journal of Internet Technology and Secured Transactions, 2016 Vol.6 No.3, pp.178 - 185

Received: 26 Jan 2016
Accepted: 24 May 2016

Published online: 21 Nov 2016 *

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