A Survey of Identity-based Signcryption

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. Signcryption has found many applications, such as electronic transaction protocol, mobile agent protocol, key management, and routing protocol. In this article, the state-of-the-art of identity-based signcryption (IBSC) is surveyed. We examine the security model of IBSC. We survey the existing IBSC schemes and compare their security properties and efficiency. IBSC with special properties and identity-based hybrid signcryption are investigated. Some possible future work is also pointed out.