Signcryption is a 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 address a question whether it is possible to construct a hybrid signcryption scheme in identity-based setting. This question seems to have never been addressed in the literature. We answer the question positively in this paper. In particular, we extend the concept of signcryption key encapsulation mechanism to the identity-based setting. We show that an identity-based signcryption scheme can be constructed by combining an identity-based signcryption key encapsulation mechanism with a data encapsulation mechanism. We also give an example of identity-based signcryption key encapsulation mechanism.

Since their introduction in constructive cryptographic applications, pairings over (hyper)elliptic curves are at the heart of an ever increasing number of protocols. Software implementations being rather slow, the study of hardware architectures became an active research area. In this paper, we discuss several algorithms to compute the ηT pairing in characteristic three and suggest further improvements. These algorithms involve addition, multiplication, cubing, inversion, and sometimes cube root extraction over GF(3m). We propose a hardware accelerator based on a unified arithmetic operator able to perform the operations required by a given algorithm. We describe the implementation of a compact coprocessor for the field GF(397) given by GF(3)[x]/(x97+x12+2), which compares favorably with other solutions described in the open literature.

In this paper, we propose a modified etaTpairing algorithm in characteristic three which does not need any cube root extraction. We also discuss its implementation on a low cost platform which hosts an Altera Cyclone II FPGA device. Our pairing accelerator is ten times faster than previous known FPGA implementations in characteristic three.