LPKI - A Lightweight Public Key Infrastructure for the Mobile Environments

TL;DR

This paper introduces LPKI, a lightweight public key infrastructure tailored for mobile environments, leveraging elliptic curve cryptography and signcryption to reduce computational costs and communication overheads.

Contribution

It proposes a novel lightweight PKI for resource-constrained mobile platforms, incorporating a validation authority to offload computational validation tasks.

Findings

Reduces computational costs for mobile devices.

Decreases communication overhead in mobile PKI.

Enhances security for mobile commerce applications.

Abstract

The non-repudiation as an essential requirement of many applications can be provided by the asymmetric key model. With the evolution of new applications such as mobile commerce, it is essential to provide secure and efficient solutions for the mobile environments. The traditional public key cryptography involves huge computational costs and is not so suitable for the resource-constrained platforms. The elliptic curve-based approaches as the newer solutions require certain considerations that are not taken into account in the traditional public key infrastructures. The main contribution of this paper is to introduce a Lightweight Public Key Infrastructure (LPKI) for the constrained platforms such as mobile phones. It takes advantages of elliptic curve cryptography and signcryption to decrease the computational costs and communication overheads, and adapting to the constraints. All the computational costs of required validations can be eliminated from end-entities by introduction of a validation authority to the introduced infrastructure and delegating validations to such a component. LPKI is so suitable for mobile environments and for applications such as mobile commerce where the security is the great concern.