Security weakness of a certificate-based proxy signature scheme for IIoT environments

Recently, Zhu et al. analyzed a certificate-based proxy signature scheme proposed by Verma et al. and provided a revised scheme [9]. In this paper, we revisit Zhu et al.'s attack and show that the fundamental problem of the Verma et al.'s scheme is that it uses a weak ordinary signature scheme as a building block. In addition, based on the fact that the revised scheme shares many of the components which use the weak signature in the Verma et al.'s scheme, we show that the attack against the Verma et al.'s scheme can be similarly applied to the revised scheme.(c) 2023 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Automated summary

This paper revisits Zhu et al.'s attack on a certificate-based proxy signature scheme proposed by Verma et al., and shows that the fundamental problem of Verma et al.'s scheme lies in its use of a weak ordinary signature scheme. Furthermore, the paper demonstrates that the attack against Verma et al.'s scheme can be similarly applied to the revised scheme, as they share many components using the weak signature.