Tony Donegan, Stuart Govan, Morag Hickman, Andrew. Müller and Ann Thompson. DAVID POINTCHEVAL. David Pointcheval obtained his PhD in. Computer ...
www.ietdl.org Published in IET Information Security doi: 10.1049/iet-ifs:20089019
In Special Section on Group-Oriented Cryptographic Protocols
ISSN 1751-8709
Editorial Group-oriented cryptographic protocols Group-oriented cryptographic protocols are foundational for the security of various group applications, such as digital conferencing, groupware, group communication systems, computer-supported collaborative work-flow systems, multiuser information distribution and sharing, data base and server replication systems, peer-to-peer and ad-hoc groups, group-based admission and access management, electronic voting and election, applications in federative or distributed environment, etc. A variety of cryptographic techniques and assumptions provides a solid basis for the design of provably secure grouporiented cryptographic protocols, which is an important and challenging task. Formal security models for group-oriented cryptographic protocols require consideration of a large number of potential threats resulting from the attacks on the communication channel and from the misbehaviour of some protocol participants. The aim of this Special Issue was to publish some recent developments of multi-party and group-oriented applications, putting forward how intricate are the security models, since the adversaries can be authorised participants, legitimate members of the groups. Its origins come from the 1st International Workshop on Group Oriented Cryptographic Protocols (GOCP ’07) in conjunction with ICALP, which was held in Wrocław, Poland in July 2007. The first paper, by Michel Abdalla, Eike Kiltz and Gregory Neven, deals with encryption in groups: more precisely, it provides a generalised key delegation technique, which extends hierarchical encryption to more complex access structures than simple trees. Since public keys are simply identities, such a new primitive can be derived into identitybased broadcast encryption, a quite important primitive for distribution of encrypted content, such as pay-TV. Broadcast encryption is also a side application of the second paper, by Łukasz Krzywiecki, Mirosław Kutyłowski IET Inf. Secur., 2008, Vol. 2, No. 3, pp. 65 – 66 doi: 10.1049/iet-ifs:20089019
and Maciej Nikodem, since it deals with key management, able to exclude users. Some kind of anonymity is provided by this scheme, since some information about excluded users can be hidden. Finally, the third paper, by Emmanuel Bresson and Mark Manulis, also deals with key management, but so that a group of users agrees on a common secret key, in order to establish a secure channel, allowing a secure communication among the group. Insider adversaries are considered in a new and stronger security model. I hope that the reader will enjoy reading this Special Issue, and will find these high-quality papers useful and inspiring. I would like to thank all authors who have submitted papers to the Special Issue and in particular those whose papers have been published for their prompt responses to the reviewers’ requests. I also wish to express my gratitude to all reviewers of the papers. Thanks also to the editorial staff at the IET, especially Tony Donegan, Stuart Govan, Morag Hickman, Andrew Mu¨ller and Ann Thompson. DAVID POINTCHEVAL David Pointcheval obtained his PhD in Computer Science from ENS in 1996, in the field of cryptography. Since 1998, he has been a CNRS researcher, in the Computer Science Department at Ecole Normale Supe´rieure, in the Cryptography Team, that he has now been leading since 2005. His research focuses on provable security of cryptographic primitives and protocols: he first studied signatures, then encryption, in the classical 65
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www.ietdl.org two-party scenario; he has more recently dealt with protocols in groups, such as group key exchange and broadcast encryption. He is an author of more than 100 international conference and journal papers, and an inventor of 10 patents. He was the program chair of the Cryptographers’ Track at the RSA Conference 2006 (CT-RSA ’06) that was held in California in February 2006, and the program co-chair of the 5th International Workshop on Cryptology and Network Security (CANS ‘06) that was held in China in December 2006. He
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will be the program co-chair of the 7th International Conference on Applied Cryptography and Network Security (ACNS ’09), that will be held in France in June 2009. He is an associate editor of several journals, and a co-editor in chief of the International Journal of Applied Cryptography, Inderscience Publishers. He has been a member of International Association for Cryptologic Research (IACR) since 1993, and was elected as a director of the board of IACR in 2008.
IET Inf. Secur., 2008, Vol. 2, No. 3, pp. 65– 66 doi: 10.1049/iet-ifs:20089019
