HSC-MET: Heterogeneous signcryption scheme supporting multi-ciphertext equality test for Internet of Drones

Area of Science:

• Cybersecurity
• Network Architecture
• Cryptography

Background:

• The Internet of Drones (IoD) architecture facilitates data collection and access control for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs).
• Existing cloud-assisted IoD schemes face challenges in secure communication across heterogeneous cryptosystems and lack support for multi-ciphertext equality tests.
• These limitations hinder efficient and secure data retrieval in complex IoD environments.

Purpose of the Study:

• To propose a novel Heterogeneous Signcryption scheme with Multi-ciphertext Equality Test (HSC-MET) for enhanced IoD security and performance.
• To enable secure and efficient multi-user simultaneous retrieval of multiple ciphertexts.
• To bridge the gap between Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) and Certificateless Cryptography (CLC) in IoD data communication.

Main Methods:

• Development of a heterogeneous signcryption scheme (HSC-MET) incorporating multi-ciphertext equality test techniques.
• Implementation of secure data communication bridging PKI and CLC using heterogeneous signcryption.
• Design of the scheme to operate without bilinear pairings, reducing computational overhead.

Main Results:

• The proposed HSC-MET scheme facilitates safe and efficient multi-user simultaneous retrieval of multiple ciphertexts.
• Secure data communication is achieved between PKI and CLC environments.
• The scheme demonstrates reduced computational cost due to the absence of bilinear pairing computations.

Conclusions:

• The HSC-MET scheme significantly improves security and performance in cloud-assisted IoD networks.
• The scheme's confidentiality, unforgeability, and anonymity are proven under the Computational Diffie-Hellman (CDH) problem in the Random Oracle Model (ROM).
• HSC-MET offers a robust solution for secure data management and retrieval in heterogeneous IoD systems.