Improved TLS Handshake Protocols Using Identity-Based Cryptography

Transport layer security (TLS) protocol is widely used in e-business and information systems for providing security attributes such as authentication, confidentiality and integrity. However, the certificate-based mechanism which is adopted by most TLS handshake protocols results in complex certificate management overheads and long handshake latency. To overcome these disadvantages, a series of handshake protocols were presented that applies identity-based encryption, signature, signcryption, and authenticated key agreement schemes respectively. Security analysis indicates that the identity-based protocols have equivalent security level but more security attributes than the standard certificate-based schemes and the ones proposed in the literature so far. Experiment results show that our schemes have commensurate cryptographic computation overheads comparing with other schemes, but achieve shorter handshake latency especially in bandwidth-limited environments because of less communication traffic.