Secure and Efficient Certificateless Signcryption Protocol for Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs)

Abstract

In WBANs, security and efficiency are critical concerns. Devices communicate via an insecure short-range communication standard, exposing patients’ sensitive data to security breaches. Additionally, WBAN entities are resource-constrained devices that demand lightweight computations. Meanwhile, researchers have designed numerous schemes to combat the above mentioned problems. Nevertheless, several schemes rely on bilinear pairing and certificate management, which are heavy cryptographic operations, thus suffering computational inefficiencies. To resolve security and efficiency issues, we design and validate a secure and efficient certificateless signcryption scheme using elliptic curve cryptography and general hash functions to signcrypt and unsigncrypt messages. Besides, we conduct formal security proof using the Random Oracle Model (ROM) to demonstrate Indistinguishability under Chosen Ciphertext Attack (IND-CCA) and Existential Unforgeability under Chosen Message Attack (EUF-CMA). From the formal security proof, the proposed scheme has proven to be IND-CCA and EUF CMA secure against adversaries of Type I and Type II. Finally, we conduct efficiency evaluation in terms of computation and communication costs. During performance evaluation, we analyzed the computational and communication costs and compared them with state-of-the-art works, where the proposed scheme showed computation efficiency improvements and communication efficiency improvement against other schemes. Compared to existing schemes, the scheme from this study has better performance in terms of computation and communication cost, thus its applicability in WBANs environment.