Analysis and Improvement of a Certificateless Signature Scheme for Resource-Constrained Scenarios

Recently, Thumbur et al. introduced a paring-free certifcateless signature scheme to resolve security and efficiency issues in resource-constrained devices and claimed it was secure. However, we find that their scheme is vulnerable to signature forgery attack. To solve the above security challenges, we present a new pairing-free certificateless signature scheme and then formally prove its security under the ECDLP assumption, and finally we conduct a performance analysis and comparison. Security analysis and performance evaluation demonstrate that our new proposal can enjoy a higher level of security with a lower computation cost and communication cost, it is more practical in resource-constrained scenarios.