AbstractIn an identity‐based designated verifier proxy signature (ID‐DVPS) scheme, only a designated verifier can verify the validity of a proxy signed message, which is suitable for many applications such as electronic voting (e‐voting) and software licensing. On the basis of the requirements for actual applications, till now, many ID‐DVPS schemes have been proposed. However, it has been found that most of existed ID‐DVPS schemes have at least one of the following disadvantages: informal security proof, which makes these schemes vulnerable to attack, so they cannot be applied in practical environments; high computation and communication cost, which limits their practical applications especially in limited resource environments. In this paper, in order to obtain better properties of ID‐DVPS scheme, we propose a novel ID‐DVPS scheme. Compared with other existed ID‐DVPS schemes, our scheme not only has lower computational cost but also has shorter signature size (only one element is needed for a signature). What is more, we present a formal definition of security model for ID‐DVPS scheme and show a formal security proof of our new scheme based on the bilinear Diffie–Hellman assumption in the random oracle model. Additionally, we also present an instance of applying our ID‐DVPS scheme to e‐voting. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.