Abstract
Signcryption is a very studied primitive in cryptography, which simultaneously performs the functionalities of encryption and signature, in a more efficient way than encrypting and signing separately. The variant of signcryption where the unsigncryption power is distributed among a group of users, through a (t,n) threshold process, has received very few attention (maybe surprisingly).
In this work we consider this task of threshold unsigncryption. First we describe the (strong) security requirements that such a protocol should satisfy: existential unforgeability and indistinguishability, under insider chosen message/ciphertext attacks, in a multi-user setting. We then show that the existing threshold unsigncryption protocols in the literature (including generic constructions obtained by composing a signature scheme and a threshold decryption scheme) do not achieve this strong level of full security. Finally, we propose a new protocol for threshold unsigncryption, which we prove to be fully secure -as described above- in the random oracle model.
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Herranz, J., Ruiz, A., Sáez, G. (2010). Fully Secure Threshold Unsigncryption. In: Heng, SH., Kurosawa, K. (eds) Provable Security. ProvSec 2010. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 6402. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-16280-0_18
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-16280-0_18
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