Precision agriculture (PA) involves collecting, processing, and analyzing datasets in agriculture for an informed decision. Due to the high data storage and application maintenance costs, farmers usually outsource their agricultural data obtained from PA to cloud service providers to leverage cloud services. Nonetheless, serious security concerns arise from using cloud services for farmers. For instance, an attacker can intercept agricultural data and run comprehensive statistical analyses to adjudicate farmers’ financial status, extort money, commit identity theft, etc. As a result, compelling data security schemes have become crucial for secure precision farming, where only legitimate users are required to access the agricultural data outsourced to the cloud. This article presents a certificateless signcryption scheme with proxy re-encryption (CLS-PRE) for secure access control in PA. An in-depth security analysis proves that the CLS-PRE scheme is secure in the Random Oracle Model. Detailed performance evaluation also shows that the scheme can reduce the time required to signcrypt and unsigncrypt messages and lower communication overhead.

The distribution of personal health records (PHRs) via a cloud server is a promising platform as it reduces the cost of data maintenance. Nevertheless, the cloud server is semi-trusted and can expose the patients’ PHRs to unauthorized third parties for financial gains or compromise the query result. Therefore, ensuring the integrity of the query results and privacy of PHRs as well as realizing fine-grained access control are critical key issues when PHRs are shared via cloud computing. Hence, we propose new personal health records sharing scheme with verifiable data integrity based on B+ tree data structure and attribute-based signcryption scheme to achieve data privacy, query result integrity, unforgeability, blind keyword search, and fine-grained access control.