A Secure Certificateless Signcryption Scheme Without Pairing for Internet of Medical Things

The Internet of Medical Things (IoMT), which integrates medical sensors with the Internet of Things, is helpful for providing remote diagnosis and real-time decision making. Massive data collected by medical and healthcare monitoring sensors in the IoMT involves sensitive patient information. It brings some security challenges to validate the legitimacy of participating entities and protect patient data privacy. A certificateless signcryption (CLSC) scheme combines encryption and signature that can offer authenticity, confidentiality, and unforgeability, providing a viable solution to the data privacy issue of the IoMT. However, existing CLSC schemes fail to meet confidentiality or unforgeability, or require expensive computation overhead to perform pairing operations. This article first presents a new CLSC scheme for secure data transmission and better smart services in IoMT, which replaces the signature part with the Schnorr signature. We then give a thorough security proof under the random oracle model. Besides, we elaborately evaluate the performance and security of some existing solutions with our solution. Finally, the experiment results indicate that our solution can achieve a better balance between security and performance than some existing schemes. Therefore, in terms of feasibility, our scheme is more suitable for the IoMT scenario.

Automated summary

The Internet of Medical Things (IoMT), which combines medical sensors with the Internet of Things, enables remote diagnosis and real-time decision making. However, it raises security challenges due to the sensitive patient information involved. This article presents a new certificateless signcryption (CLSC) scheme for data privacy in IoMT, utilizing the Schnorr signature for improved security and performance.