Cryptanalysis and improvement of a certificateless encryption scheme in the standard model

Certificateless public key cryptography eliminates inherent key escrow problem in identity-based cryptography, and does not yet requires certificates as in the traditional public key infrastructure. In this paper, we give crypt-analysis to Hwang et al.’s certificateless encryption scheme which is the first concrete certificateless encryption scheme that can be proved to be secure against “malicious-but-passive” key generation center (KGC) attack in the standard model. Their scheme is proved to be insecure even in a weaker security model called “honest-but-curious” KGC attack model. We then propose an improved scheme which is really secure against “malicious-but-passive” KGC attack in the standard model.