Trusted platform modules (TPMs) are hardware modules that are bound to a computer's motherboard, that are being included in many desktops and laptops. Augmenting computers with these hardware modules adds powerful functionality in distributed settings, allowing us to reason about the security of these systems in new ways. In this dissertation, I study the functionality of TPMs from a theoretical as well as an experimental perspective. On the theoretical front, I leverage various features of TPMs to construct applications like random oracles that are impossible to implement in a standard model of computation. Apart from random oracles, I construct a new cryptographic primitive which is basically a non-interactive form of the standard cryptographic primitive of oblivious transfer. I apply this new primitive to secure mobile agent computations, where interaction between various entities is typically required to ensure security. I prove these constructions are secure using standard cryptographic techniques and assumptions. To test the practicability of these constructions and their applications, I performed an experimental study, both on an actual TPM and a software TPM simulator which has been enhanced to make it reflect timings from a real TPM. This allowed me to benchmark the performance of the applications and test the feasibility of the proposed extensions to standard TPMs. My tests also show that these constructions are practical.

An identity-based cryptosystem (IBC) is a public-key system where the public key can be represented by any arbitrary string such as an e-mail address. The notion was introduced by Shamir with the primary goal of simplifying certificate management. An identity-based signature(IBS) is the identity-based counter part of a digital signature. In the first (and primary) part of the work, we take a closer look at an IBS due to Galindo and Garcia–GG-IBS, for short. GG-IBS is derived through a simple and elegant concatenation of two Schnorr signatures and, importantly, does not rely on pairing. The security is established through two algorithms (both of) which use the Multiple-Forking(MF) Algorithm to reduce the problem of computing the discrete logarithm to breaking the IBS. Our focus is on the security argument : It turns out that the argument is flawed and, as a remedy, we sketch a new security argument. However, the resulting security bound is still quite loose, chiefly due to the usage of the MF Algorithm. We explore possible avenues for improving this bound and , to this end, introduce two notions pertaining to random oracles termed dependency and independency. Incorporating (in) dependency allows us to launch the nested replay attack far more effectively than in the MF Algorithm leading to a cleaner,(significantly) tighter security argument for GG-IBS, completing the final piece of the GG-IBS jigsaw. The second part of the work pertains to the notion of selective-identity (sID) for IBCs. The focus is on the problem of constructing a fully-secure IBS given an sID-secure IBS without using random oracles and with reasonable security degradation.