Informatica

In 1995, Wu proposed a remote login authentication scheme based on geometric approach. However, Chien, Jan and Tseng presented a cryptanalysis of Wu’s scheme to show that it is not secure. Moreover, they proposed a modified version of Wu’s scheme. This paper presents there is a serious weakness in this modified remote login authentication scheme. We show that an illegal user can easily forge a valid login request in the modified version proposed previously.

In 2001, Hsu et al. proposed a non‐repudiable threshold proxy signature with known signers. In their scheme, the proxy group cannot deny having signed the proxy signature if they did. However, Hsu et al.'s scheme is vulnerable to some attacks. A malicious original signer or malicious proxy signer can impersonate some other proxy signers to generate proxy signatures. In this article, we shall present our cryptanalysis of the Hsu et al.'s scheme. After that, we shall propose a new threshold proxy signature that can overcome the weaknesses.

Sun's nonrepudiation threshold proxy signature scheme is not secure against the collusion attack. In order to guard against the attack, Hwang et al. proposed another threshold proxy signature scheme. However, a new attack is proposed to work on both Hwang et al.'s and Sun's schemes. By executing this attack, one proxy signer and the original signer can forge any valid proxy signature. Therefore, both Hwang et al.'s scheme and Sun's scheme were insecure.

A group signature scheme is a digital signature scheme that allows a group member to sign messages anonymously on behalf of the group. Recently, Tseng and Jan proposed two group signature schemes based on self‐certified and ID‐based public keys respectively. However, these two schemes were shown to be insecure against forgery due to Joye et al. Later, Sun et al. showed that Tseng and Jan's self‐certified group signature scheme is linkable. In this paper, we first point out that the proposed linking equation, which is used to check the linkability of Tseng and Jan's self‐certified scheme, cannot work because the inverse problem of RSA is hard. A repaired linking equation is consequently proposed to fix this problem. Then, we show that Tseng and Jan's ID‐based scheme is still linkable because given any two valid group signatures it is easy to decide whether these two group signatures are generated by the same group member or not.

In the (t,n) proxy signature scheme, the signature, originally signed by a signer, can be signed by t or more proxy signers out of a proxy group of n members. Recently, an efficient nonrepudiable threshold proxy signature scheme with known signers was proposed by H.-M. Sun. Sun's scheme has two advantages. One is nonrepudiation. The proxy group cannot deny that having signed the proxy signature. Any verifier can identify the proxy group as a real signer. The other is identifiable signers. The verifier is able to identify the actual signers in the proxy group. Also, the signers cannot deny that having generated the proxy signature. In this article, we present a cryptanalysis of the Sun's scheme. Further, we propose a secure, nonrepudiable and known signers threshold proxy signature scheme which remedies the weakness of the Sun's scheme.