ID-based cryptography helps us to simplify key management process in traditional public key infrastructures. Any public information such as the e-mail address, name, etc., can be used as a public key and this solves the problem of obtaining the public key of a party and checking that its certificate is valid. ID-based cryptography has been a very active area of research in cryptography since bilinear pairings were introduced as a cryptographic tool. There have been many proposals for ID-based signatures recently. In this thesis, we introduce the concept of generalized ID-based ElGamal signatures and show that most of the proposed ID-based signature schemes in the literature are special instances of this generalized scheme. We also investigate ID-based signatures providing additional properties. Signature schemes with message recovery provide the feature that the message is recoverable from the signature and hence does not need to be transmitted separately. Blind signatures provide the feature that a user is able to get a signature without giving the actual message to the signer. Finally, signcryption schemes fulfill the job of a digital signature and encryption in a single step with a lower computational cost. We generalize the signatures providing these properties and obtain numerous new signatures which have not been explored before. The generalized ID-based signatures we described provide a unified framework for ID-based ElGamal signatures and extensions. Additionally, some of our blind signatures turn out to be more efficient than the previously proposed schemes.

DATE: 28 July, 2008, Monday@ 10:00
PLACE: EA 409