PUF-Based Multi-Receiver Anonymous Signcryption Scheme in Edge Computing

Edge computing extends some tasks of center cloud server to the edge of the network, which can effectively alleviate the problems of high computation overhead and long processing latency caused by massive devices and data in the era of Internet of Everything. In edge computing environment, edge nodes and terminal devices are usually deployed in the unattended and open places, making them vulnerable to physical attacks while facing traditional security threats. To achieve secure communication in edge computing, several multi-receiver signcryption schemes with high communication efficiency have been proposed. However, there are still two issues with the application of existing schemes in areas with high security requirements: (1) no prevention mechanism for physical attacks is provided; (2) the anonymity protection for the senders has not been implemented. To fill this gap, we propose an efficient multi-receiver and multi-message signcryption scheme based on the hardware security primitive physical unclonable function (PUF) in this paper. Combining PUF with certificateless public key cryptography (CL-PKC) on elliptic curve, the proposed scheme does not need to use bilinear pairings with high computational complexity and is free from the key escrow problem. The security analysis shows that the scheme can effectively prevent physical attacks while possessing security attributes including confidentiality, unforgeability, and anonymity. Compared with related schemes, the proposed scheme achieves higher security with lower communication overhead without significantly increasing the computation overhead, which can better meet the requirements of secure communication in edge computing. © 2024 Chinese Institute of Electronics. All rights reserved.