A New Efficient and Provably Secure Certificateless Signature Scheme Without Bilinear Pairings for the Internet of Things

Pairing-free certificateless signature (PF-CLS) schemes are ideal authentication solutions for resource-constrained environments like the Internet of Things (IoT) due to their low computational, storage, and communication resource requirements. However, it has come to light that many PF-CLS schemes are vulnerable to forged signature attacks. In this paper, we use a novel attack method to prove that a class of PF-CLS schemes with the same security vulnerabilities cannot resist Type I adversary attacks, and we find that, even if some schemes are improved to invalidate existing attack methods, they still cannot defend against the new attack method proposed in this paper. Subsequently, we introduce an enhanced scheme proven to be resilient against both types of adversary attacks under the random oracle model (ROM). Performance analysis shows that, compared with several existing PF-CLS schemes, our scheme offers higher computational efficiency.