PSCLS: provably secure certificateless signature scheme for IoT device on cloud

Internet of things (IoT) devices are being used to provide services to different spheres of society. These devices gather data from industries and forward their data to the cloud server to minimize data storage and processing. In IoT, the cloud plays an important role because IoT is a resource constraint device with limited battery and memory. In order to handle this, IoT devices gather the data and send it to the cloud server so that space will be available for IoT data at the IoT device. Apart from this, IoT devices are computationally inefficient. For example, sometimes users want huge computation of IoT data, but due to the limited computation power of IoT devices, users cannot get the results. To overcome this issue, IoT device collaborates with the cloud server and outsource the data to it. The cloud server has huge computational power; it uses the received data, performs the computation, and sends it back to the IoT device. Authentication of the outsourced IoT data is a serious concern in the industrial IoT network. Several certificateless signature (CLS) schemes have been proposed to provide for data authentication in the IoT network. Current CLS schemes either suffer from the huge computation overhead or adversarial attacks. To solve these problems, we propose a provably secure certificateless signature (PSCLS) scheme. The PSCLS scheme’s security depends on the computational Diffie-Hellman problem in the random oracle model with a tight reduction. The scheme requires only one pairing operation, and it is secure from adversarial attacks. We analyzed the PSCLS scheme’s performance with the other existing CLS schemes in terms of computation and communication costs. The results prove that the PSCLS scheme performs better than the other existing CLS schemes.