Efficient many-to-one authentication with certificateless aggregate signatures

Aggregate signatures allow an efficient algorithm to aggregate n signatures of n distinct messages from n different users into one single signature. The resulting aggregate signature can convince a verifier that the n users did indeed sign the n messages. This feature is very attractive for authentications in bandwidth-limited applications such as reverse multicasts and senor networks. Certificateless public key cryptography enables a similar functionality of public key infrastructure (PKI) and identity (ID) based cryptography without suffering from complicated certificate management in PKI or secret key escrow problem in ID-based cryptography. In this paper, we present a new efficient certificateless aggregate signature scheme which has the advantages of both aggregate signatures and certificateless cryptography. The scheme is proven existentially unforgeable against adaptive chosen-message attacks under the standard computational Diffie-Hellman assumption. Our scheme is also very efficient in both communication and computation and the proposal is practical for many-to-one authentication. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.