Hy‐Cert: A Hybrid Certificate Verification System Using Blockchain for Secure Communication

ABSTRACT Recently, certificate management has been considered one of the crucial tasks of public key infrastructure (PKI), which also provides crucial privacy and security over the blockchain. Moreover, the recent discovery of multiple promising approaches provides less security, threats, incremental deployment challenges, and inefficiency, which strongly impact blockchain. On account of these issues, this research established a new strategy for certificate management, Hybrid Certificate Verification (Hy‐Cert) for Public Key Infrastructure. The contribution of this work is deployed in two phases, including the verification phase and key generation phase, which contemplate secure communication for certificate management. In this approach, the trapdoor, as well as proposed efficiency factor‐based verification, is implemented as a two‐step verification, which highly scrutinizes the authenticity of users and allows superior and safe communication. On the other hand, Hybrid public key generation (Hy‐Key) using a hybrid public key infrastructure is developed, which resembles the traditional key generation mechanism for encryption and decryption of data over the information‐centric network. In Hy‐Key, more powerful techniques such as Rivest, Shamir, Adleman (RSA) and Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) algorithms are associated and undergo enormous security measures for better communication during certificate management. The system validation was performed on Students mark sheet and COVID‐19 datasets by varying users (500–2500) and transactions (1000–4000). For 2500 users, Hy‐Cert achieved 0.59 ms certification delay, 1.09 ms delay, 0.91 genuine user rate, 254.60 KB memory, 3.29 ms responsiveness, and 5.50 ms time. Similarly, for 4000 transactions, the corresponding values were 0.50 ms, 1.26 ms, 0.89, 257.93 KB, 3.75 ms, and 5.95 ms, respectively.