  An authenticated encryption scheme allows messages to be encrypted and
authenticated simultaneously. In 2003, Ma and Chen proposed such a scheme with
public verifiability. That is, in their scheme the receiver can efficiently
prove to a third party that a message is indeed originated from a specific
sender. In this paper, we first identify two security weaknesses in the Ma-Chen
authenticated encryption scheme. Then, based on the Schnorr signature, we
proposed an efficient and secure improved scheme such that all the desired
security requirements are satisfied.
