Securing Wireless Body Area Network with lightweight certificateless signcryption scheme using equality test

The growth of Internet of Things (IoT) technologies, such as cloud computing, 5G communication, and wireless sensor networks, is driving a smarter and more connected future. Thousands of terabytes of data are uploaded to cloud servers each day for storage or computation. Due to data privacy, we cannot upload personal pictures, videos, locations, and medical records directly to the cloud because they will be at risk if compromised. Due to the untrusted nature of the cloud, data needs to be encrypted to ensure confidentiality before being outsourced to it. The data must first be decrypted before any operation can be performed, which can be resource-intensive and wasteful. Secure data transmission from sensors to an Internet host becomes a critical issue for the success of IoT. To address these issues, this paper introduces a lightweight certificateless signcryption scheme with an equality test (CLS-ET), which leverages the power of hyperelliptic curves. This scheme obtains the security goals of authentication, integrity, confidentiality, and non-repudiation in one logical step. Furthermore, this scheme enables us to verify whether two ciphertexts are encrypted with the same or different keys that contain the same information without decrypting them. Indistinguishability under adaptive chosen ciphertext attack (IND-CCA2), existential unforgeability under chosen message attack (EUF-CMA), and one-wayness under adaptive chosen ciphertext attack (OW-CCA2) level security have been achieved by the proposed scheme in the Random Oracle Model (ROM). Furthermore, we compared our proposed scheme with other existing state-of-the-art schemes. While maintaining security and functionality, our scheme reduces computation costs for encryption, decryption, and testing stages, thereby improving efficiency in resource-constrained IoT-enabled Wireless Body Area Networks.