Quantum Attack-Resistant Certificateless Multi-Receiver Signcryption Scheme

Abstract

The existing certificateless signcryption schemes were designed mainly based on the traditional public key cryptography, whose security relies on the hard problems, such as factor decomposition, and discrete logarithm. However, these problems will be easily solved by the quantum computing. So the existing certificateless signcryption schemes are vulnerable to quantum attacks. Multivariate public key cryptography (MPKC), which can resist the quantum attack, is one of the alternatives to guarantee the security of communication in the post-quantum age. Motivated by these concerns, we proposed a new construction of the certificateless multi-receiver signcryption scheme (CLMSC) based on MPKC. The new scheme inherits the security of MPKC, that is, it can withdraw quantum attacks. Multivariate quadratic polynomial operations, which need lower computation than pairing operations, are employed in signcrypting a message for any number of receivers in our scheme. We proved its semantic security under the hardness of Multivariate Quadratic (MQ) problem and its unforgeability under the Isomorphism of Polynomials (IP) assumption in the random oracle model, respectively. The results of analyses show that our scheme also has the security properties of non-repudiation, perfect forward secrecy, perfect backward secrecy and publicly verifiability. Compared with the existing schemes in terms of the computational complexity and the ciphertext size, our scheme is more efficient, and thus it is suitable for terminals with lower computation capacity like smart cards. © 2013 Li et al.