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A lightweight pairing-free ciphertext-policy attribute-based signcryption for cloud-assisted IoT

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Abstract

Cloud-Assisted Internet of Things (IoT) has become an increasingly widespread technological trend that can significantly improve the performance of IoT applications by outsourcing massive data from IoT devices to the cloud due to their limited storage and computation capabilities. Since the cloud is not fully trusted, the outsourced data has security issues, such as confidentiality, authenticity, and access control. Attribute-based Signcryption (ABSC) is a promising cryptographic solution to address the above problems. However, the existing ABSC schemes create heavy computation overhead and are unsuitable for some resource-constrained IoT devices. This paper proposes a lightweight pairing-free ciphertext-policy ABSC for Cloud-Assisted IoT (PF-CP-ABSC). This scheme uses elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) to reduce computation overhead instead of bilinear-pairings. Further, we adopt CP-ABSC to provide confidentiality, authenticity, and fine-grained access control. In the security analysis, we prove the security of the PF-CP-ABSC scheme under the hardness of Elliptic Curve Decisional Diffie-Hellman (ECDDH) and Elliptic-curve Discrete Logarithm problem (ECDLP). The theoretical analysis and experimental results show that this scheme is lightweight and is suitable for resource-constrained IoT applications.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. National Institute of Technology (NIT)-Tiruchirappalli, Tamilnadu, India

    Medikonda Asha Kiran & R Eswari

  2. IDRBT, Hyderabad, Telangana, India

    Medikonda Asha Kiran & Syam Kumar Pasupuleti

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  1. Medikonda Asha Kiran
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  2. Syam Kumar Pasupuleti
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  3. R Eswari
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Correspondence to Medikonda Asha Kiran.

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Kiran, M.A., Pasupuleti, S.K. & Eswari, R. A lightweight pairing-free ciphertext-policy attribute-based signcryption for cloud-assisted IoT. Peer-to-Peer Netw. Appl. 15, 2390–2403 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12083-022-01356-x

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