Rogue Public Key Registration Attack and the Importance of 'Proof of Possession' in the PKI Environment

Younho LEE
Yongsu PARK
Heeyoul KIM
Seong-Min HONG
Hyunsoo YOON

Publication
IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Information and Systems   Vol.E89-D    No.8    pp.2452-2455
Publication Date: 2006/08/01
Online ISSN: 1745-1361
DOI: 10.1093/ietisy/e89-d.8.2452
Print ISSN: 0916-8532
Type of Manuscript: LETTER
Category: Application Information Security
Keyword: 
proxy signature,  digital signature,  cryptanalysis,  

Full Text: PDF(81.5KB)>>
Buy this Article



Summary: 
The security vulnerabilities of a number of provable secure proxy signature schemes are examined with the assumption that users can register their public keys without having corresponding private keys. This assumption is different from that of a standard proxy signature in which the public keys of users are authentic. Under this assumption, both the Triple Schnorr scheme and Kang et al's scheme are shown to be vulnerable to a rogue public key registration attack. This attack gives an adversary the ability to generate a proxy signature without the valid agreement of the original signer. Moreover, it is shown that an adversary can manipulate the description of a delegated signing right at will. This work can be considered as an awakening to the importance of Proof of Possession (PoP) in the PKI environment, as in many cases certificate authorities do not require the PoP protocol, as has been stated [1].


open access publishing via