Cryptanalysis of a certificateless signature scheme without pairings

Certificateless cryptography is an attractive paradigm for public key cryptography as it does not require certificates in traditional public key cryptography and, at the same time, solves the inherent key escrow problem in identity‐based cryptography. Recently, an efficient certificateless signature scheme without using pairings was proposed by He, Chen and Zhang. They claimed that it is provably secure under the discrete logarithm assumption in the random oracle model. However, in this paper, we show that their scheme is insecure against a type II adversary who can access to the master secret key of the system. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.