Analysis of certificateless signcryption schemes and construction of a secure and efficient pairing-free one based on ECC

Abstract

Signcryption is a cryptographic primitive that provides authentication (signing) and confidentiality (encrypting) simultaneously at a lower computational cost and communication overhead. With the proposition of certificateless public key cryptography (CLPKC), certificateless signcryption (CLSC) scheme has gradually become a research hotspot and attracted extensive attentions. However, many of previous CLSC schemes are constructed based on time-consuming pairing operation, which is impractical for mobile devices with limited computation ability and battery capacity. Although researchers have proposed pairing-free CLSC schemes to solve the issue of efficiency, many of them are in fact still insecure. Therefore, the challenging problem is to keep the balance between efficiency and security in CLSC schemes. In this paper, several existing CLSC schemes are cryptanalyzed and a new CLSC scheme without pairing based on elliptic curve cryptosystem (ECC) is presented. The proposed CLSC scheme is provably secure against indistinguishability under adaptive chosen-ciphertext attack (IND-CCA2) and existential unforgeability under adaptive chosen-message attack (EUF-CMA) resting on Gap Diffie-Hellman (GDH) assumption and discrete logarithm problem in the random oracle model. Furthermore, the proposed scheme resists the ephemeral secret leakage (ESL) attack, public key replacement (PKR) attack, malicious but passive KGC (MPK) attack, and presents efficient computational overhead compared with the existing related CLSC schemes.