Proxy signcryption scheme in the standard model

Abstract Proxy signcryption is a novel cryptographic primitive that combines the functionality of a proxy signature with that of a signcryption. However, the security of all the known proxy signcryption schemes were proven in the random oracle, which has received a lot of criticism that the proofs in the random oracle model are not sound with respect to the standard model. Hence, it is an interesting research problem on how to construct a provably secure proxy signcryption scheme in the standard model. In this paper, motivated by Waters' signature scheme, we propose a new construction of proxy signcryption scheme based on bilinear pairing without using random oracles. Then, we use the techniques from provable security to show that the proposed scheme is indistinguishability under adaptive chosen ciphertext attacks secure under the decisional bilinear Diffie–Hellman assumption and existentially unforgeable under the computational Diffie–Hellman assumptions. Compared with the existing schemes with formal security proof, we show that no pairing computation is required in our proxy signcrypt phase with pre‐computations. To the best of our knowledge, our proposed scheme is the first provably secure proxy signcryption scheme in the standard model. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.