Paper 2018/386

Certificateless Public Key Signature Schemes from Standard Algorithms

Zhaohui Cheng and Liqun Chen

Abstract

Certificateless public key cryptography (CL-PKC) is designed to have succinct public key management without using certificates at the same time avoid the key-escrow attribute in the identity-based cryptography. However, it appears difficult to construct CL-PKC schemes from standard algorithms. Security mechanisms employing self-certified key (also known as implicit certificate) can achieve same goals. But there still lacks rigorous security definitions for implicit-certificate-based mechanisms and such type of schemes were not analyzed formally and often found vulnerable to attacks later. In this work, we first unify the security notions of these two types of mechanisms within an extended CL-PKC formulation. We then present a general key-pair generation algorithm for CL-PKC schemes and use it with the key prefixing technique to construct certificateless public key signature (CL-PKS) schemes from standard algorithms. The security of the schemes is analyzed within the new model, and it shows that the applied technique helps defeat known-attacks against existing constructions. The resulting schemes could be quickly deployed based on the existing standard algorithm implementations. They are particularly useful in the Internet of Things (IoT) to provide security services such as entity authentication, data integrity and non-repudiation because of their low computation cost, bandwidth consumption and storage requirement.

Note: The expanded version of the paper appeared on ISPEC 2018 and some changes in Introduction