Secure and Lightweight Signcryption Scheme With Group Equality Test for Heterogeneous WBAN

Abstract

Wireless body area network (WBAN) integrates body sensors to collect and upload various health indicators, which facilitates timely remote healthcare. To realize the real-time monitoring of the patient’s health status while ensuring the security of sensitive data, signcryption schemes with equality test provide a feasible solution. Nevertheless, most of the existing schemes suffer from heavy computational burdens and are vulnerable to some inherent threats, such as offline message recovery attack (OMRA) and known session temporary key attack (KSTKA). Additionally, some of them cannot provide the essential security properties. To cope with these problems, this article constructs a secure and lightweight signcryption scheme with group equality test, which is suitable for the heterogeneous environment. To formally define the resistance to OMRA and KSTKA, we first propose two corresponding security models. Then, we introduce a group mechanism to the equality test to support the aforementioned security properties. Besides, we adopt the online/offline construction to avert the time-consuming operations in the real-time data processing phase. Furthermore, our scheme supports message aggregation to reduce the computational overhead of handling multiple messages. Formal security proof shows that our scheme satisfies confidentiality and unforgeability. Compared to several recent schemes, the experimental results demonstrate that our scheme enjoys the best performance in terms of both computational overhead and communication cost. With implementation, our scheme is proved to be feasible for lightweight devices in real-world applications.