Privacy-Enhancing Group Signcryption Scheme

Abstract

In the last decades, several signcryption schemes have been developed for different privacy-enhancing purposes. In this paper, we propose a new privacy-enhancing group signcryption scheme that provides: unforgeability, confidentiality, ciphertext and sender anonymity, traceability, unlinkability, exculpability, coalition-resistance, and unforgeable tracing verification. It is important to notice that the proposed scheme allows a signer to anonymously signcrypt a message on the group’s behalf (i.e., sender’s anonymity). The security analysis of the scheme is also provided. Our proposal is proven to be strongly existentially unforgeable under an adaptive chosen message attack, indistinguishable under an adaptive chosen ciphertext attack, and to provide ciphertext anonymity under an adaptive chosen ciphertext attack. Furthermore, the scheme is extended to work in a multi-receiver scenario, where an authorized group of receivers is able to unsigncrypt the ciphertext. The experimental results show that our scheme is efficient even on computationally restricted devices and can be therefore used in many IoT applications. The Signcrypt protocol on smart cards takes less than 1 s (including communication overhead). The time of the Unsigncrypt protocol on current ARM devices is negligible (less than 40 ms).