Breaking and fixing of an identity based multi-signcryption scheme

Signcryption is a cryptographic primitive that provides authentication and confidentiality simultaneously in a single logical step. It is often required that multiple senders have to signcrypt a single message to a certain receiver. Obviously, it is inefficient to signcrypt the messages separately. An efficient alternative is to go for multi-signcryption. The concept of multi-signcryption is similar to that of multi-signatures with the added property - confidentiality. Recently, Jianhong et al. proposed an identity based multi-signcryption scheme. They claimed that their scheme is secure against adaptive chosen ciphertext attack and it is existentially unforgeable. In this paper, we show that their scheme is not secure against chosen plaintext attack and is existentially forgeable, we also provide a fix for the scheme and prove formally that the improved scheme is secure against both adaptive chosen ciphertext attack and existential forgery. © Springer-Verlag 2009.