Efficient Pairing-Free Identity-Based Signcryption Scheme for Cloud-Assisted IoT

The Internet of Things (IoT) has become a part of our everyday life. Due to limited storage and computational capabilities, data collected by IoT devices outsource to cloud servers. Although cloud servers provide many benefits, confidentiality and authenticity are the major issues. Signcryption is a cryptographic technique to address the above issues. Several identity-based signcryption schemes are proposed; however, these schemes create heavy computation and communication overhead because of bilinear pairings. This paper proposes an Efficient Pairing-Free Identity-based Signcryption (EPFIBSC) scheme based on Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC), which reduces computation and communication overhead. The EPFIBSC scheme's security is proven under Elliptic Curve Discrete Logarithm Problem (ECDLP). The scheme also meets the security requirements such as confidentiality, authenticity, and unforgeability. In performance analysis, the authors compare the scheme with some of the existing schemes; the comparison shows that this scheme is more efficient in computation and communication costs.