Provably Secure Certificate-Based Signcryption Scheme without Pairings

Certificate-based cryptography is a new cryptographic paradigm that provides an interesting balance between identity-based cryptography and traditional public key cryptography. It not only simplifies the complicated certificate management problem in traditional public key cryptography, but also eliminates the key escrow problem in identity-based cryptography. As an extension of the signcryption in certificate-based cryptography, certificate-based signcryption provides the functionalities of certificate-based encryption and certificate-based signature simultaneously. However, to the best of our knowledge, all constructions of certificate-based signcryption in the literature so far have to be based on the costly bilinear pairings. In this paper, we propose a certificate-based signcryption scheme that does not depend on the bilinear pairings. The proposed scheme is provably secure in the random oracle model. Due to avoiding the computationally-heavy paring operations, the proposed scheme significantly reduces the cost of computation and outperforms the previous certificate-based signcryption schemes.