A Certificateless Aggregate Arbitrated Signature Scheme for IoT Environments

The Internet of Things (IoT) environment consists of numerous devices. In general, IoT devices communicate with each other to exchange data, or connect to the Internet through a gateway to provide IoT services. Most IoT devices participating in the IoT service are lightweight devices, in which the existing cryptographic algorithm cannot be applied to provide security, so a more lightweight security algorithm must be applied. Cryptographic technologies to lighten and provide efficiency for IoT environments are currently being studied a lot. In particular, it is necessary to provide efficiency for computation at a gateway, a point where many devices are connected. Additionally, as many devices are connected, data authentication and integrity should be fully considered at the same time, and thus digital signature schemes have been proposed. Among the recently studied signature algorithms, the certificateless signature (CLS) based on certificateless public key cryptography (CL-PKC) provides efficiency compared to existing public key-based signatures. However, in CLS, security threats, such as public key replacement attacks and signature forgery by the malicious key generation center (KGC), may occur. In this paper, we propose a new signature scheme using CL-PKC in generating and verifying the signature of a message in an IoT environment. The proposed scheme is a certificateless aggregate arbitrated signature, and the gateway aggregates the signatures of messages generated by the device group to reduce the size of the entire signature. In addition, it is designed to be safe from security threats by solving the problems caused by public key replacement attacks and malicious KGC, and adding arbitrated signatures of the gateway to strengthen non-repudiation.