A light-weight certificate-less public key cryptography scheme based on ECC

With the rapid development of mobile computing, more and more mobile devices, such as smart phones and tablets are able to access Internet. As these mobile devices are usually battery powered, energy efficiency is a very important issue. For most mobile applications, energy saving should be considered at the design stage. Of course, security application is no different. Public key cryptography plays an important role in network security, and it is still essential in mobile computing despite it needs high energy consumption. Considering Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) is easy to perform in hardware and needs lower energy than other public key algorithms. We propose an ECC-based certificate-less public key cryptography scheme. The scheme is lightweight and can save energy for mobile devices. Firstly, it does not need certificate to prove the authenticity of a public key, which can save energy for certificate transmission. Secondly, it is constructed on the traditional ECC instead of bilinear pairing, which makes it lightweight and can save energy for computation. In addition, it avoids the key escrow issue, which makes it has higher security strength than traditional public key cryptography. These advantages make it very suitable for resources-constrained mobile devices.