Efficient and provably-secure certificateless short signature scheme from bilinear pairings

Certificateless public key cryptography is a recently proposed attractive paradigm which combines advantages of both certificate-based and ID-based public key cryptosystems as it avoids usage of certificates and does not suffer from key escrow. In this paper, we present a certificateless signature (CLS) scheme that is proved to be secure in the random oracle model under the hardness assumptions of k-CAA and Inv-CDHP. Our scheme upholds all desirable properties of previously proposed CLS schemes, and requires general cryptographic hash functions instead of the MapToPoint hash function which is inefficient. Furthermore, our scheme is significantly more efficient than all known CLS schemes, and the size of signatures generated by our scheme is approximate 160 bits. which is the shortest certificateless signatures so far. So it can be used widely, especially in low-bandwidth communication environments. (C) 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.