SCBS: A Short Certificate-Based Signature Scheme With Efficient Aggregation for Industrial-Internet-of-Things Environment

Abstract

The advent of the Internet of Things (IoT) has escalated the sharing of information among various smart devices many fold, irrespective of their geographical location. Recently, applications, such as e-healthcare, farm monitoring, border security, smart transportation, etc. have attracted wide attention from the research community. However, as devices in the Industrial-IoT (IIoT) environment share their information using the Internet, security issues, such as authentication, integrity, and confidentiality of data pose various challenges to the research community for the successful implementation of any solution. To handle these issues, several digital signature-based schemes have been designed in the past. However, because of the usage of the identity-based public-key cryptography (IDPKC) or certificate-less-based public-key cryptography (CLPKC), these schemes suffer from key escrow or secret key distribution problems. To eliminate these flaws, this article presents a short digital signature scheme without pairing in certificate-based setting with aggregation in IIoT environment. Besides, in IIoT environment, communication and computational costs are also considered as imperative challenges. In this regard, the pairing free construction, short length signature and aggregation make it a communication and computational efficient signature scheme. The performance comparison of the proposed scheme shows that our scheme causes less computational overhead and takes significantly less execution time as compared to the existing schemes, which is imperative for the resource limited IIoT devices. We also demonstrate that signature aggregation and verification cost is 6.67(n+2) ms which is much less in comparison to the verification cost ( 20.01n ms) of n short signatures.