AN ENCRYPTION/SIGNATURE SCHEME WITH LOW MESSAGE EXPANSION

Abstract

Secrecy, authenticity and integrity are three major services provided by the public key cryptography. To provide these three services via the ElGamal public key cryptosystem and Signature scheme, the message expanding ratio is four and the overhead of communication is heavy. In this paper, a concurrent encryption/signature scheme will be proposed to provide these three services with a lower message expanding ratio. In the new scheme, the signer can encrypt and sign the message concurrently so the signature that serves as the ciphertext is a pair of integers. Thus the message expanding ratio can be decreased to two.