Deniable authenticated encryption for e-mail applications

ABSTRACT

In this paper, we introduce a deniable electronic mail authenticated encryption service. Our design meets the security requirement of the current Pretty Good Privacy and Secure/Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions to provide message confidentiality and message authentication without the undesired non-repudiation, which can protect the individual privacy of the sender when communication occurs in open channels. Our scheme is based on the bilinear pairings, which is provably secure in the random oracle model under the bilinear Diffie-Hellman and computational Diffie-Hellman assumptions. In addition, our scheme needs a little high communication overhead. However, this extra cost is reasonable for the properties of deniable authentication, confidentiality, and ciphertext anonymity.

KEYWORDS:

• Deniable authenticated encryption
• e-mail
• bilinear pairings
• random oracle model

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work is supported by the Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province [grant number BK20161302], Electric Power Company Technology Project of Jiangsu Province [grant number J2017123].

Notes on contributors

Chunhua Jin

Chunhua Jin received her B.S. degree from Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi'an, P.R. China in 2007, M.S. degree from Xidian University, Xi'an, P.R. China in 2011, and Ph.D. degree in Cryptography from University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, P.R. China in 2016. She is now a teacher in the Faculty of Computer and Software Engineering, Huaiyin Institute of Technology, Huai'an, P.R. China. Her recent research interests include cryptography and network security.

Guanhua Chen

Guanhua Chen received his B.S. degree from Xi'an University of Technology, Xi'an, P.R. China in 2006. He is now a teacher in the Faculty of Computer and Software Engineering, Huaiyin Institute of Technology, Huai'an, P.R. China. His recent research interests include cryptography and network security.

Changhui Yu

Changhui Yu received her B.S. degree from Liaoning Normal University, Dalian, P.R. China in 1996, M.S. degree from Southeast University, Nanjing, P.R. China in 2009. She is now a teacher in the Faculty of Computer and Software Engineering, Huaiyin Institute of Technology, Huai'an, P.R. China. Her recent research interests include cryptography and network security.

Jianyang Zhao

Dr. Jianyang Zhao, a Professor of Huaiyin Institute of Technology, received the Ms.D. degree in power electronic engineering and Ph.D. degree in test measurement technique and instrument from the Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics. His current research interests are power quality monitoring and analysis, transient analysis, and power system equipment modeling and diagnoses.