An efficient anonymous certificateless proxy signcryption scheme without bilinear pairings over elliptic curves

Abstract

In real-world applications, anonymity, confidentiality, and unforgeability play pivotal roles in secure communication, especially in the scenarios where privacy and security are dominant concerns. The novel paradigm of certificateless anonymous proxy signcryption introduced in this work allows the original signer to expose the proxy signer’s identity if it is misused, while simultaneously granting anonymity to the proxy signer. We design a CL-APSC mechanism and it’s security is proven by using the Diffie-Hellman and discrete logarithm problem in the elliptic curve. Additionally, we provide a security model and a formal definition of the certificateless anonymous proxy signcryption (CL-APSC) technique. Since the proposed approach operates in a certificateless environment, it eliminates the overhead of maintaining certificates and avoids the key escrow problem.  Our aim in this article is to reduce the computational cost with the existing schemes and also provides anonymity to the proxy identity.