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 2004, Abe et al. proposed a threshold signer-ambiguous signature scheme from variety of keys. Their scheme is a generalized case of the ring signature scheme, and it allows the key types to be based on the trapdoor one-way permutations (TOWP) or sigma-protocols including Schnorr's signature scheme. However, the signed message is public for all, which may result in disputes. In this paper, we present a novel threshold signer-ambiguous signature scheme, having the signed message concealed and keeping who the receivers are secret from variety of keys.

Recently, e-commerce becomes widespread; hence electronic department stores come into being. As a result, Chan and Chang proposed a scheme for digital gift certificates in 2002. Because it is hard to estimate the number of the clients of the electronic department stores, reducing the computation complexity of the electronic department stores becomes an important issue. Due to the need, we propose two schemes for digital gift certificates. Our proposed schemes are very practical since the computation load is light. So the schemes can be applied to the terminals with low computation power.

Most recent papers about visual cryptography for halftone images are dedicated to get a higher contrast decoded image. However, the hidden visual pattern often blends into the background image and leads to a confused image. In this paper, we propose an improved method for halftone image hiding. By using the proposed method, the background image can be eliminated and the hidden visual pattern can be revealed precisely. Experimental results show that the decoded visual patterns could reveal good visual quality under various kinds of input patterns. Furthermore, better visual quality can be obtained when more halftone images are overlaid.