Provably Secure and Generalized Signcryption With Public Verifiability for Secure Data Transmission Between Resource-Constrained IoT Devices

The Internet of Things (IoT) is revolutionizing our modern lives by introducing active connection between smart devices. However, IoT devices are repeatedly exhibiting many security flaws, which will inevitably lead to eavesdropping and impersonation attacks. Thus, providing a proper security in IoT becomes a prime focus for the researchers. In cryptography, certificateless signcryption (CLSC) is one of the recent public key techniques for the security requirements of the authenticity and confidentiality of any message between the parties. In this article, a new generalized CLSC (gCLSC) is introduced to provide the functions of digital signature and encryption to fulfill the authenticity and confidentiality for the resource-constrained IoT devices. Besides, the gCLSC supports the property of public verifiability and security of an ideal signcryption under the strong Diffie-Hellman and bilinear Diffie-Hellman inversion problems without random oracle model. Performance assessment of the gCLSC gives satisfactory results after comparing with other competitive CLSC schemes in terms of its functionality. Therefore, the gCLSC can be adopted in the IoT networks where authenticity, confidentiality, and lightweight are the essential factors.