How to construct efficient signcryption schemes on elliptic curves

Signcryption is a new paradigm in public key cryptography. A remarkable property of a signcryption scheme is that it fulfills both the functions of public key encryption and digital signature, with a cost significantly smaller than that required by signature-then-encryption. The purposes of this paper are to demonstrate how to specify signcryption schemes on elliptic curves over finite fields, and to examine the efficiency of such schemes. Our analysis shows that when compared with signature then-encryption on elliptic curves, signcryption on the curves represents a 58% saving in computational cost and a 40% saving in communication overhead. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.