A secure and efficient certificateless signature scheme for Internet of Things

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a new technological innovation, which makes things intelligent and our life more convenient. To ensure secure communication between smart objects in the IoT, certificateless signature is a feasible cryptographic tool to provide data integrity and identity authentication, which eliminates the cumbersome certificate management in the certificate-based signature system, as well as the key escrow problem in the identity-based cryptosystem. However, most of the existing certificateless signature schemes are not all secure to resist various attacks, such as public key replacement attacks or malicious-but-passive key-generation-center attacks. Besides, due to the limited storage and processing capabilities of these smart things, they are unable to meet the real-time demands of the IoT completely. This paper first analyzes Jia’s scheme. We prove that the claimed solution is not resistant to the Type II strong adversaries. Then, we propose a novel certificateless signature scheme and prove its existentially unforgeable under the elliptic curve discrete logarithm problem assumption. Finally, the comprehensive performance evaluations indicate that, at the same security level, our scheme is more efficient than other certificateless signature schemes and is well suitable for the resource-constrained IoT environment.