A biometric identity-based signcryption scheme

Signcryption is a high performance cryptographic primitive that fulfills both the functions of digital signature and public key encryption simultaneously, at a cost significantly lower than that required by the traditional signature-then-encryption approach. In this paper, we introduce biometrics into identity-based signcryption. We formalize the notion of biometric identity-based signcryption and propose an efficient biometric identity-based signcryption scheme that uses biometric information to construct the public key. We prove that our scheme satisfies confidentiality and unforgeability in the random oracle model. We show that both the computational costs and the communication overheads of our scheme are lower than those of the signature-then-encryption approach. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.