Achieving Identity-based cryptography in a personal digital assistant

Abstract

Continuous technological advances have allowed that mobile devices, such as Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs), can execute sophisticated applications that more often than not must be equipped with a layer of security that should include the confidentiality and the authentication services within its repertory. Nevertheless, when compared against front-end computing devices, most PDAs are still seen as constrained devices with limited processing and storage capabilities. In order to achieve Identity-Based Cryptography (IBC), which was an open problem proposed by Adi Shamir in 1984, Boneh and Franklin presented in Crypto 2001, a solution that uses bilinear pairings as its main building block. Since then, IBC has become an active area of investigation where many efficient IBC security protocols are proposed year after year. In this paper, we present a cryptographic application that allows the secure exchange of documents from a Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) that is wirelessly connected to other nodes. The architecture of our application is inspired by the traditional PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) email security protocol. Our application achieves identity-based authentication and confidentiality functionalities at the 80-bit security level through the usage of a cryptographic library that was coded in C++. Our library can perform basic primitives such as bilinear pairings defined over the binary field and the ternary field , as well as other required primitives known as map-to-point hash functions. We report the timings achieved by our application and we show that they compare well against other similar works published in the open literature.