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

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.