Cost-Effective Proxy Signcryption Scheme for Internet of Things

The Internet of things (IoT) has emerged into a revolutionary technology that enables a wide range of features and applications given the proliferation of sensors and actuators embedded in everyday objects, as well as the ubiquitous availability of high-speed Internet. When nearly everything is connected to the Internet, security and privacy concerns will become more significant. Furthermore, owing to the resource-constrained nature of IoT devices, they are unable to perform standard cryptographic computations. As a result, there is a critical need for efficient and secure lightweight cryptographic scheme that can meet the demands of resource-constrained IoT devices. In this study, we propose a lightweight proxy in which a person/party can delegate its signing authority to a proxy agent. Existing proxy signcryption security approaches are computationally costly and rely on RSA, bilinear pairing, and elliptic curves cryptography (ECC). The hyperelliptic curve cryptosystem (HECC), on the other hand, employs a smaller key size while maintaining the same level of security. When assessed using the random oracle model (ROM), the proposed scheme provides resilience against indistinguishable under adaptive chosen ciphertext attacks (IND-CCA) and unforgeable under adaptive chosen message attacks (UU-ACMA). To demonstrate the viability of the proposed scheme, security analyses and comparisons with existing schemes are performed. The findings show that the proposed scheme provides high security while reducing computational and communication costs.