No abstract

No abstract

No abstract

With the rapid development of the Internet of Things (IoT), a lot of sensitive information in our daily lives are now digitalized and open to remote access. The provision of security and privacy of such data would incur comprehensive cryptographic services and has raised wide concern. Hybrid signcryption schemes could achieve various kinds of cryptographic services (e.g., confidentiality, authenticity, and integrity) with much lower cost than the combination of separate traditional cryptographic schemes with each providing a single cryptographic service. Thus, hybrid signcryption schemes are very suitable for IoT environments where resources are generally very constrained (e.g., lightweight sensors and mobile phones). To ensure that the overall hybrid signcryption scheme provides adequate cryptographic service (e.g., confidentiality, integrity, and authentication), its parts of KEM (key encryption mechanism) and DEM (data encryption mechanism) must satisfy some security requirements. Chosen-ciphertext attack (CCA) security has been widely accepted as the golden standard requirement for general encryption schemes. However, CCA security appears too strong in some conditions. Accordingly, Canetti et al. (CRYPTO 2003) proposed the notion of replayable CCA security (RCCA) for encryption schemes, which is a strictly weaker security notion than CCA security and naturally more efficient. This new security notion has proved to be sufficient for most existing applications of CCA security, e.g., encrypted password authentication. This is particularly promising for IoT environments, where security is demanding, yet resources are constrained. In this paper, we examine the RCCA security of the well-known SKEM+DEM style hybrid signcryption scheme by Dent at ISC 2005. Meanwhile, we also examine the RCCA security of the Tag-SKEM+DEM style hybrid signcryption scheme by Bjorstad and Dent at PKC 2006. We rigorously prove that a hybrid signcryption scheme can achieve RCCA security if both its SKEM part and its DEM part satisfy some security assumptions.

In this paper, we present a pollution attack on the homomorphic message authentication code scheme PMAC, which was proposed, by Cheng, Jiang, and Zhang in [IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications/Supplement 2013; 31(9): 291–298]. In particular, Cheng et al. claimed that their main contribution lies in that, compared with the existing scheme, such as SpaceMac, PMAC can achieve a reliable security 1/qℓ instead of 1/q (for SpaceMac), where q is usually set as a small number in practical applications and ℓ is a flexible parameter chosen by users to improve their security level. However, by presenting a pollution attack, we prove that PMAC can only achieve the security at most 1/q no matter how large ℓ is. Our attack shows that it may be dangerous to directly use PMAC in the peer‐to‐peer live streaming systems. Moreover, we also point out a basic but fatal error in their proof of theorem 1 and hope that by identifying the design flaw, similar mistakes can be avoided in future design of homomorphic message authentication code. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.