Efficient zero-knowledge identification scheme with secret key exchange

In an open network-computing environment, a workstation cannot be trusted to identify its users correctly to network services. Identification protocols provide an approach for the receiver of a message to ascertain its origin and to verify the identity of the sender in a distributed environment. Challenge-response identification schemes have been used to provide the authentication service but it might nonetheless reveal some partial information about the claimant's secret; an adversarial verifier might also be able to strategically select challenges to obtain responses providing such information. Zero-knowledge (ZK) protocols are designed to address these concerns, by allowing a prover to demonstrate knowledge of a secret while revealing no information to be used by the verifier to convey the demonstration of knowledge to others. In this paper we present a Fiat-Shamir-like zero-knowledge identification scheme based on the elliptic curve discrete logarithm problem. We combined our scheme with secret key exchange for subsequent conventional encryption. We expand our scheme to support mutual identification, for open network application.