Efficient chosen-ciphertext secure certificateless threshold key encapsulation mechanism

As a practical extension of our previous work on certificateless threshold cryptosystem, this paper proposes the first direct certificateless threshold key encapsulation mechanism that inherits the same trust level of the original scheme and removes the length limitation of a traditional public key encryption. Security against threshold chosen-ciphertext attacks are proved in a random oracle model under a new assumption. It tolerates the Type I adversary that can replace public keys and the Type II adversary that has access to the system's master key. The implied encapsulation scheme is very efficient when compared to the most efficient schemes in a traditional public key cryptosystem, and it is slightly more efficient in terms of key length and encapsulation speed when compared to the identity-based cryptosystems that have the same ciphertext overhead. Finally, we describe several potential modifications of our scheme. (C) 2009 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.