Cryptanalysis and Improvement of Zheng's Signcryption Technique

The signcryption technique was first proposed by Y. Zheng, where two cryptographic operations digital signature and message encryption are made combinedly. We cryptanalyze the technique and observe that the signature and encryption become vulnerable if the forged public keys are used. This paper proposes an improvement using modified DSS (Digital Signature Standard) version of ElGamal signature and DHP (Diffie-Hellman key exchange protocol), and shows that the vulnerabilities in both the signature and encryption methods used in Zheng's signcryption are circumvented. DHP is used for session symmetric key establishment and it is combined with the signature in such a way that the vulnerabilities of DHP can be avoided. The security and performance analysis of our signcryption technique are provided and found that our scheme is secure and designed using minimum possible operations with comparable computation cost of Zheng's scheme.