Summary Internet of things environment is adopted widely in different industries and business organizations with varying capacity. It provides a favorable environment to outsource the crowdsourced data in the cloud to minimize the cost of computation, which is called crowdsourcing. Crowdsourcing is a technique where individuals or organizations obtain goods and services. A professional or industry outsource the crowdsourced data in the cloud, where confidentiality and authenticity of data become essential. Signcryption is the cryptographic technique that serves both the authenticity and the privacy of transmitted messages. This technique ensures secure authentic data transmission and storage. Therefore, this paper proposes an identity‐based signcryption scheme. In the proposed PSSCC framework, the user does pairing free computation during signcryption, which makes efficient calculation on user‐side. Moreover, PSSCC framework is proved secure under modified bilinear Diffie‐Hellman inversion and modified bilinear strong Diffie‐Hellman problems. The performance analysis of PSSCC with related schemes indicates that the proposed system supports efficient communication along with less computation cost.

As the technology era progresses, many opportunities are brought to the healthcare industry. With the support of technology and Internet of Things platforms, e-healthcare is now more common than ever. However, the sensitive nature of healthcare records makes them vulnerable to many attacks. Therefore, a privacy-enabled framework for cloud-based e-healthcare systems is proposed to achieve privacy-preserved and secured communication in e-healthcare. The analysis of the proposed protocol is presented in this article to demonstrate that it is secure against all well-known security attacks and provides patient anonymity, doctor anonymity, and patient and doctor unlinkability while ensuring data confidentiality. Additionally, the security simulations are performed using the Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications tool. We also performed the proposed framework's performance analysis and compared it with existing frameworks. The analysis result indicates that the proposed framework achieves encouraging performance over other frameworks while ensuring security.

In 1 the authorship was originally shown as “Ashok Kumar Das, Dheerendra Mishra and Sourav Mukhopadhyay”. This has now been corrected to “Dheerendra Mishra, Ashok Kumar Das and Sourav Mukhopadhyay”. We apologize for any inconvenience caused.

Abstract Internet‐based content distribution facilitates an efficient platform to sell the digital content to the remote users. However, the digital content can be easily copied and redistributed over the network, which causes huge loss to the right holders. On the contrary, the digital rights management (DRM) systems have been introduced in order to regulate authorized content distribution. Enterprise DRM (E‐DRM) system is an application of DRM technology, which aims to prevent illegal access of data in an enterprise. Earlier works on E‐DRM do not address anonymity, which may lead to identity theft. Recently, Chang et al. proposed an efficient E‐DRM mechanism. Their scheme provides greater efficiency and protects anonymity. Unfortunately, we identify that their scheme does not resist the insider attack and password‐guessing attack. In addition, Chang et al.'s scheme has some design flaws in the authorization phase. We then point out the requirements of E‐DRM system and present the cryptanalysis of Chang et al.'s scheme. In order to remedy the security weaknesses found in Chang et al.'s scheme, we aim to present a secure and efficient E‐DRM scheme. The proposed scheme supports the authorized content key distribution and satisfies the desirable security attributes. Additionally, our scheme offers low communication and computation overheads and user's anonymity as well. Through the rigorous formal and informal security analyses, we show that our scheme is secure against possible known attacks. Furthermore, the simulation results for the formal security analysis using the widely accepted Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications tool ensure that our scheme is also secure. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.