A Provably Secure Certificateless Signature Scheme With Anonymity for Healthcare IIoT
Zirui Qiao, Ran Xu, Yanwei Zhou, Bo Yang, Tianqing Zhu, Mingwu Zhang · IEEE Internet of Things Journal · 2025
The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is changing our way of life and work. As the number of mobile devices connected to IIoT increases, users will face many security challenges, such as insecure communication environments. The certificateless signature (CLS) scheme can ensure the integrity and validity of data and provide secure identity authentication for the IIoT, and several pairing-free CLS schemes have been proposed in recent years. However, we find they are vulnerable to the signature forgery attack of malicious key generation centers by safety analysis, which does not realize the security they have claimed. To solve this problem, we show an improved CLS scheme that achieves anonymity and formally proves its security under the hardness of the discrete logarithm problem in the random oracle. Comprehensive performance analysis and comparison show that our scheme has less communication and computation costs with higher security, and our construction is suitable for scenarios with limited resources. Finally, we apply this scheme to construct a mutual identity authentication protocol in the healthcare IIoT environment.