A new provably secure certificateless short signature scheme

Certificateless public key cryptography simplifies the complex certificate management in the traditional public key cryptography and resolves the key escrow problem in identity-based cryptography. In 2007, Huang et al. revisited the security models of certificateless signature scheme. They classified adversaries according to their attack power into normal, strong, and super adversaries (ordered by their attack power). Recently, Du and Wen proposed a short certificateless signature scheme and presented that their scheme is secure against the strong adversary in the random oracle model. In this paper, we show that their short signature scheme is insecure against the strong adversary. We then propose a new short certificateless signature scheme which is secure against the super adversary. Our scheme is the first certificateless signature scheme which satisfies both the strongest security level and the shortest signature length. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.