Cryptanalysis and improvement of signcryption schemes on elliptic curves

In this paper, we analyze two signcryption schemes on elliptic curves proposed by Zheng Yu-liang and Hideki Imai. We point out a serious problem with the schemes that the elliptic curve based signcryption schemes lose confidentiality to gain non-repudiation. We also propose two improvement versions that not only overcome the security leak inherent in the schemes but also provide public verifiability or forward security. Our improvement versions require smaller computing cost than that required by signature-then-encryption methods.