A pairing-free key-insulated certificate-based signature scheme with provable security

Certificate-based signature (CBS) combines the advantages of both public key-based signature and identity-based signature, while saving from the disadvantages of drawbacks in both PKS and IBS. The insecure deployment of CBS under the hostile circumstances usually causes the exposure of signing key to be inescapable. To resist the threat of key leakage, we present a pairing-free key insulated CBS scheme by incorporating the idea of key insulated mechanism and CBS. Our scheme eliminates the costly pairing operations and as a matter of fact outperforms the existing key insulated CBS schemes. It is more suitable for low-power devices. Furthermore, the unforgeability of our scheme has been formally proven to rest on the discrete logarithm assumption in the random oracle model.