An Efficient Certificateless Signature Scheme With Provably Security and Its Applications

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) is helpful in making people's life more convenient and efficient. To ensure that the nodes within IoT can interact securely, a certificateless signature (CLS) can be used to protect message authentication in the IoT. Recently, some concrete constructions of CLS schemes have been proposed in the literature, but through our analyses, we demonstrate that some existing CLS schemes cannot keep their claimed security because of various security flaws. For example, a valid signature can be forged by any Type I adversary by replacing the corresponding user's public key. In this article, we describe the security flaws that need to be addressed and introduce a novel CLS scheme without using bilinear mapping. The existential unforgeability in our proposed scheme can be proved based on the hardness of the elliptic curve discrete logarithm problem in the random oracle model. The comparison with existing CLS schemes shows that our scheme not only enjoys more security features but also is more efficient in computation. Moreover, we introduce an identity authentication protocol as the application of our proposed CLS scheme, which achieves mutual authentication and anonymity in communications.