Cryptanalysis and Improvement of a Certificateless Multi-proxy Signature Scheme

Article type: Research Article

Authors: Tian, Miaomiao | Yang, Wei | Huang, Liusheng

Affiliations: School of Computer Science and Technology, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei 230026, P.R. China. miaotian@mail.ustc.edu.cn

Note: [] Address for correspondence: School of Computer Science and Technology, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei 230026, P.R. China.

Abstract: Certificateless cryptography is a new type of public key cryptography, which removes the certificate management problem in traditional public key cryptography and the key escrow problem in identity-based public key cryptography. Multi-proxy signature is an extension of proxy signature, which allows an original signer authorizing a group of proxy signers and only the cooperation of all proxy signers in the group can create valid proxy signatures on behalf of the original signer. Recently, Jin and Wen combined certificateless cryptography with multi-proxy signature, and proposed a model as well as a concrete scheme of certificateless multi-proxy signature. They claimed that their scheme is provably secure in their security model. Unfortunately, in this paper by giving two attacks, we will show that their certificateless multi-proxy signature scheme can be broken. The first attack indicates their security model is flawed and the second attack indicates their certificateless multi-proxy signature scheme is insecure. Possible improvements are also suggested to prevent these attacks.

Keywords: cryptanalysis, certificateless cryptography, multi-proxy signature, bilinear pairing

DOI: 10.3233/FI-2013-976

Journal: Fundamenta Informaticae, vol. 129, no. 4, pp. 365-375, 2014