A Novel Framework in Cloud Security: Remote Signcryption
Mohammad Nowsher Ali, Ximeng Liu · IEEE Internet of Things Journal · 2024
Ensuring data integrity and confidentiality is critical in communication systems. Traditional methods, such as separate encryption and signature schemes, often lead to inefficiencies. While signcryption methods address both needs simultaneously, they are inadequate for data outsourcing systems like cloud computing due to the requirement for original files during data verification. Conversely, remote data integrity checking (RDIC) methods eliminate the need for original files but lack confidentiality. This article fills the gap in cloud security by introducing remote signcryption (RSC) and presenting the first concrete RSC scheme. We demonstrate the application of this novel approach in cloud-assisted Internet of Things (IoT) networks. Our work includes defining the security for an RSC scheme and proving its security under the bilinear Diffie-Hellman (BDH) hardness assumption. Implementing our proposed scheme on real data from trending YouTube video statistics, we found that RSC significantly outperforms existing methods, achieving 100 times faster speed and reducing communication costs by half compared to RDIC methods. Notably, even with 5 MB of outsourced data, RSC keeps the communication cost under 8 kB during data recovery, a substantial improvement over classical signcryption methods that require over 5 MB.