Enhanced Certificate-Based Encryption Scheme without Bilinear Pairings

Certificate-based cryptography is a useful public key cryptographic primitive that combines the merits of traditional public key cryptography and identity-based cryptography. It not only solves the key escrow problem inherent in identity-based cryptography, but also simplifies the cumbersome certificate management problem in traditional public key cryptography. In this paper, by giving a concrete attack, we first show that the certificate-based encryption scheme without bilinear pairings proposed by Yao et al. does not achieve either the chosen-ciphertext security or the weaker chosen-plaintext security. To overcome the security weakness in Yao et al.`s scheme, we propose an enhanced certificate-based encryption scheme that does not use the bilinear pairings. In the random oracle model, we formally prove it to be chosen-ciphertext secure under the computational Diffie-Hellman assumption. The experimental results show that the proposed scheme enjoys obvious advantage in the computation efficiency compared with the previous certificate-based encryption schemes. Without costly pairing operations, it is suitable to be employed on the computation-limited or power-constrained devices.