Abstract The idea of concurrent signature schemes is that two parties produce two respective ambiguous signatures that are concurrently bound to their corresponding signatories only while either of the party releases a keystone. The main construct is that both parties need to reach a consensus on the true fairness in mutually exchanging the signatures, and, moreover, the protocols assume that there is no collusion between a trusted third party and any of the parties. However, by collaborating over business interests with the participants as strategic partners, the trusted third party may obtain access to sensitive key data held in escrow, leading them to the collusion attack associated with malicious intentions. To circumvent the misbehavior among the participating individuals, an identity authentication process can be used prior to exchanging or having access to any confidential information. In this paper, we propose a self-certified concurrent signature from bilinear pairings as an alternative solution to strengthen the security level for solving the fair exchange problem. Apart from resisting to the collusion attack, the proposed scheme provides the advanced security properties to prevent from the message substitution, the identity forgery and impersonation, and other generic attacks in an increasingly insecure network environment.

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[42] Zhang Z. and Xu S., “Cryptanalysis and Improvement of a Concurrent Signature Scheme Based on Identity,” in Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Software Engineering and Service Science, Beijing, pp. 453-456, 2011. Chien-Hua Tsai is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Accounting Information at Chihlee University of Technology, Taiwan. He received his Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from Case Western Reserve University, Ohio, USA in 2000. His research interests include Information Systems Security, Secure Communication Protocols, Public Key Cryptosystems and Electronic Transaction Security in Computer and Network Security. He has published several articles in most academic journals from Information Systems and e-Business Management, Security and Communication Networks, Computers and Electrical Engineering, Journal of Internet Technology, Journal of e-Business, Management Review and so on. Pin-Chang Su is presently working as a Professor in the Department of Information Management at National Defense University, Taiwan. He received his Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from Chang Gung University, Taiwan in 2007. His research mainly focuses on Algorithms Design in Error-Control Coding, Information Security, Cryptographic Systems and E-Commerce Technologies. His published articles can be found in most academic journals like KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems, Computers and Electrical Engineering, Security and Communication Networks, Journal of Internet Technology, Journal of Chung Cheng Institute of Technology, Journal of e-Business and so forth.