Certificateless multi-signer universal designated multi-verifier signature from elliptic curve group

Abstract

Certificateless public key cryptography resolves the certificate management problem in traditional public key cryptography and the key escrow problem in identity-based cryptography. In recent years, some good results have been achieved in speeding up the computation of bilinear pairing. However, the computation cost of the pairing is much higher than that of the scalar multiplication over the elliptic curve group. Therefore, it is still significant to design cryptosystem without pairing operations. A multi-signer universal designated multi-verifier signature scheme allows a set of signers to cooperatively generate a public verifiable signature, the signature holder then can propose a new signature such that only the designated set of verifiers can verify it. Multi-signer universal designated multi-verifier signatures are suitable in many different practical applications such as electronic tenders, electronic voting and electronic auctions. In this paper, we propose a certificateless multi-signer universal designated multi-verifier signature scheme and prove the security in the random oracle model. Our scheme does not use pairing operation. To the best of our knowledge, our scheme is the first certificateless multi-signer universal designated multi-verifier signature scheme.