Provably secure and pairing-free certificateless digital signature scheme using elliptic curve cryptography

Abstract

A provably secure certificateless digital signature scheme using elliptic curve cryptography is presented in this paper. Since the certificateless public key cryptosystem removes the complex certificate management procedure and the private key escrow problem of traditional public key cryptography (PKC) and identity-based cryptosystem (IBC), respectively, and as a result, the proposed scheme is more efficient than IBC- and PKC-based signatures. Besides, the bilinear pairing and map-to-point hash function are time-consuming operations, and thus the signatures without these two operations are more attractive in real applications and the present work has been carried out in this direction. Based on the elliptic curve discrete logarithm assumption, it is shown that the proposed scheme is unforgeable under the adaptive chosen message and identity attacks in the random oracle model against variety of adversaries. Finally, our signature scheme is compared with a number of competitive schemes and the satisfactory performance has been achieved.

Keywords:

• certificateless cryptosystem
• elliptic curve cryptography
• digital signature
• random oracle model
• provable security

2010 AMS Subject Classifications:

• 94A60
• 14H52
• 68P25
• 97Fxx
• 97P20

Acknowledgements

The authors are extremely grateful to Prof. George Loizou, Editor-in-Chief and anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and suggestions that help us to improve this paper. The financial support of this work is provided by the Department of Science and Technology (DST), Govt. of India under the INSPIRE fellowship Ph.D. program (Reg. No. IF10247) and the Department of Information Technology (DIT), Ministry of Communication and Information Technology, Govt. of India under the ‘Information Security Education and Awareness (ISEA)’ program (No. MIT (2)/2006-08/189/CSE). The authors are also thankful to the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Indian School of Mines, Dhanbad, for providing their research support, without such co-operation this work could not have been made.