On Proofs of Security for Certificateless Cryptosystems

Certificateless public-key encryption has recently been proposed as an attractive alternative to certificate-based and identity-based encryption schemes. The attraction of certificateless PKE is that it combines the implicit public key authentication of an identity-based scheme with the escrow-free property of a certificate-based scheme. However, all the certificateless schemes that have been thusfar presented have either had the security proved in a reduced security model, or have relied on the random oracle model. Indeed, some authors have gone as far as suggesting that it is impossible to prove the full security of a certificateless scheme in the standard model. This paper examines this claim and comes to the conclusion that, while some provable security techniques may be denied to us, there is no reason why the security of a certificateless scheme cannot be proven in the standard model.