Efficient and proactive threshold signcryption

Abstract

To make the system more secure and robust, threshold schemes are proposed to avoid single point failure. At the same time, there are more and more applications which utilize the two basic blocks encryption and digital signature to secure message delivery (such as SSL, SSH). Combining the three tools organically leads to an interesting security tool termed as threshold signcryption which can be used in distributed systems especially the mobile networks. In this paper, we present an efficient threshold signcryption scheme. The scheme is designed for an asynchronous network model which may better present practical distributed systems, especially Internet or mobile ad hoc networks. In order to resist mobile attacks, we add proactive property to our scheme. To the best of our knowledge, the proposed scheme is the first threshold signcryption scheme which is noninteractive, proactive and provably secure and works on asynchronous network models. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.