An improved certificateless public key authentication scheme for mobile ad hoc networks over elliptic curves

Abstract

Due to the resource constrained property of mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs), making their application more lightweight is one of the challenging issues. In this area, there exists a large variety of cryptographic protocols especially in the context of public key cryptosystems. The difficulty of managing complex public key infrastructures in traditional cryptosystems and the key escrow problem in identity-based ones persuaded many researchers to propose appropriate certificateless cryptosystems for such an environment. In this area, a protocol, named ID-RSA, has been proposed to authenticate the public key in RSA based schemes in the basis of certificateless cryptosystems. Although the security of this protocol is proved, the use of bilinear pairings made it computationally expensive. In this paper, we improved the performance of ID-RSA by the use of elliptic curve based algebraic groups instead of multiplicative ones over finite fields as the output of bilinear pairings. Our results show that our secure protocol is significantly more lightweight than ID-RSA.