Efficient signcryption scheme based on El-Gamal and Schnorr

Abstract

The recent advances in the Internet of Things (IoT) and wireless network applications required lightweight encryption and authentication algorithms in order to secure the communications among the distributed resources. While various mechanisms have been proposed in the cryptography, signcryption has been recognized as a suitable technique for such applications. Both functions of digital signature and public key encryption with a very low processing cost is implemented using a single logical step in the signcryption mechanism. The recent development in the signcryption concentrates on addressing extra security notions such as forward security and public verifiability scarifying some of the processing costs. The aim of this paper is to develop a new signcryption mechanism based on discrete logarithm and Schnorr algorithm to further reduce the signcryption complexity and enhance the confidentially for IoT and wireless network applications that do not required forward security and public verifiability, which increase the time significantly. Accordingly, the proposed mechanism implements minimal number of operations for session key generation, hashing and encryption. In comparison with the existing signcryption mechanism, the proposed method reduces the computational cost by reducing the number of operations while preserving the communication overhead as it is. In parallel environment, the proposed mechanism reduces the time significantly. In terms of the security concerns the confidentiality, integrity, unforgeability and verifiability were proven to be satisfied by the proposed mechanism as similar to the original signcryption.