iCLAS: An Improved Certificateless Aggregate Signature Scheme for Healthcare Wireless Sensor Networks

As the world's population gradually enters the aging stage, the smart healthcare demand has become extremely urgent and incomparably important. Healthcare wireless sensor networks (HWSNs) is one of the foundations of smart healthcare. Medical information is extremely sensitive information. However, HWSNs uses a common communication channel and is vulnerable to various types of security attacks. Therefore, ensuring the communication and data security of HWSNs and protecting patient privacy are the basis of smart healthcare. After analyzing the deficiencies of a certificateless aggregation signature scheme for HWSNs, an improved certificateless aggregation signature scheme (called iCLAS) is proposed in this paper. We present rigorous security proof that shows iCLAS can resist all kinds of security attacks and can ensure patient privacy protection. The detailed performance comparisons show iCLAS has clear advantages in computation and communication cost.