With the rapid growth of cloud storage user scale, there are dual challenges of resource waste and security hazards in massive data storage: on the one hand, redundant data exacerbates storage overhead; on the other hand, unauthorized access exacerbates the possibility of data leakage or tampering. To this end, this paper designs a shared data auditing scheme that supports fine-grained access control and cloud deduplication. First, combining Random Convergent Encryption (RCE), Proof-of-Ownership (PoW) technology, and introducing a certificate-less cryptosystem to securely deduplicate data in the cloud while eliminating certificate management and key escrow risks. Second, the data is encrypted using Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-Based Encryption (CP-ABE) technology, and only authorized users can decrypt the data based on attribute matching, which can effectively resist the risk of data leakage due to unauthorized access. At the same time, we designate an auditor to carry out data integrity auditing to prevent malicious audit behavior. Finally, Security and performance evaluations show that the scheme we’ve proposed is quite efficient and competitive.

computing power network (CPN) can possess powerful data computing capabilities and storage resources by equipping a host of computing nodes. However, data sharing in the CPN faces significant challenges, particularly in data security and access control. attribute-based searchable encryption (ABSE) is a feasible technology to tackle this problem. Nevertheless, CPNs typically contain a vast amount of sensitive data that requires strict fine-grained retrieval permissions. Hence, we construct a decentralized and anonymous ABSE scheme with policy update and batch revocation for CPN, highlighting the generation of keyword indexes based on access structure. Meanwhile, considering the limited computing power of users, we transfer the time-consuming calculation to the edge computing node. Besides, security analysis indicates that our scheme can achieve the security of chosen plaintext attack and chosen keyword attack, collusion resistance, forward and backward security. Experimental evaluations demonstrate that our scheme is trustworthy and applicable to CPNs.

With the arrival of the era of self-driving technology, 5G, and IoT technology, self-driving car Internet technology is gradually changing the way people travel. The existing signcryption scheme test scheme with equality can only compare two ciphertexts, which is not suitable for the complex network of Internet of vehicles. To address this challenge, we propose the heterogeneous signcryption scheme from public key infrastructure (PKI) to identity-based cryptosystem (IBC) with multi-ciphertext equality test in the Internet of vehicles (HSCPI-MET). This scheme enables to communicate from PKI cryptosystem to IBC cryptosystem in Internet of vehicles, at the same time excuting the equality test of multi-ciphertext. Our scheme protects inter-vehicle communication data from being illegally accessed, tampered, or forged by malicious vehicles. The proposed scheme satisfies confidentiality and unforgeability under the stochastic predictor model for the computational Diffie–Hellman assumption and the IDH assumption. In addition, we conduct a rigorous experimental evaluation of the scheme to prove that it is secure and effective in practical applications.

With the rapid development of the IIoT, security and privacy issues have become increasingly prominent when the data from IIoT devices are shared across public networks. Very recently, Wang et al. presented a blockchain-based CLS scheme for IIoT devices in order to achieve secure and lightweight communication (IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics, DOI: 10.1109/TII.2021.3084753). Wang et al. claimed that their CLS scheme is secure under the assumption of the elliptic curve discrete logarithm problem. Unfortunately, by providing two attack methods to analyze the security of Wang et al.’s CLS scheme, we find that it is insecure against universal forgery attacks. Without knowing any information about the target user's private key, the two categories of attackers can successfully forge the valid signature of any message. Hence, Wang et al.’s CLS scheme fails to achieve the claimed security goals. To fix the security flaws, we propose an enhanced blockchain-based and pairing-free CLS scheme, and prove its security in the random oracle model. Furthermore, the analysis results demonstrate that our revised scheme has higher security while keeping the performance of the original scheme.

Vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs) are integral to the evolution of intelligent transportation systems, offering substantial benefits in managing traffic flow, issuing warnings for potential accidents, and delivering information services to drivers. To ensure the authenticity and integrity of data exchanged within VANETs, numerous authentication schemes based on certificateless aggregate signature (CLAS) have been developed. However, state-of-the-art solutions often fail to be applicable in real-world VANETs due to security weaknesses and operational inefficiencies. Recently, Zhu et al. proposed an efficient CLAS-based authentication scheme with conditional privacy preservation (CPP) for VANETs (IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems, DOI: 10.1109/TITS.2023.3275077). Unfortunately, our analysis reveals that Zhu et al.’s scheme is incapable of withstanding coalition attacks from malicious RSUs and vehicles as well as public-key replacement attacks from dishonest vehicles. To facilitate secure communication in VANETs, we present a security-enhanced, pairing-free and energy-efficient CLAS-based authentication scheme with CPP for VANETs. This scheme has been rigorously proven to be secure against Type I, Type II and Type III attackers. Distinguished from other comparable schemes, our construction significantly reduces communication overhead and energy consumption while simultaneously fortifying security.

Recently, Zhan et al. presented a pairing-free certificateless aggregation signature scheme (ZH-CLAS) to address security issues in healthcare wireless medical sensor networks (HWMSNs) and proved that their scheme is secure against adaptive chosen message attacks. In this article, we analyze the security of the ZH-CLAS scheme by utilizing two types of concrete attacks. Unfortunately, we demonstrate that their scheme cannot withstand public key replacement attacks and is not secure against coalition attacks from malicious sensor nodes. To solve these security challenges, we further improve the security of the ZH-CLAS scheme. Our enhanced scheme has a fixed-length aggregate signature, which efficiently minimizes the transmission bandwidth. Additionally, our scheme outperforms related pairing-free certificateless aggregate signature schemes in terms of security and communication performance.

With the wide application of 5G network, much research has been carried out in recent years toward the 5G network slicing technology in order to save 5G network resources and satisfy the service requirements of different users. Different public key cryptosystems may be deployed in different 5G network slicings. Therefore, heterogeneous signcryption is required to achieve secure communications between different 5G network slices. The existing scheme is a one-to-one communication between 5G network slicings. To obtain one-to-many and many-to-one secure communications, two new privacy-preserving heterogeneous signcryption schemes have been proposed in this article based on 5G network slicings, which can accomplish mutual communications between the public key infrastructure (PKI) and the certificateless public-key cryptography. In this work, we present PKI$\to $CLC completely anonymous multireceiver signcryption (PMRCHS) and CLC$\to $PKI heterogeneous aggregate signcryption (CPHAS) schemes based on the 5G Internet of Things (IoT) slicing and the 5G Internet of Vehicle (IoV) slicing. Under the random oracle model (ROM), the proposed schemes have proved to satisfy confidentiality and unforgeability under the computational Diffie–Hellman problem and discrete logarithm problem (DLP). Furthermore, we make comparisons of the proposed work with the existing works in terms of computational cost, communication cost, anonymity, and communication direction. The results show that the proposed schemes are more secure and effective.

In this letter, we discuss the security weakness of Wanget al.’s attribute-based data sharing scheme, in IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INFORMATION FORENSICS AND SECURITY (TIFS) (DOI: 10.1109/TIFS.2016.2549004). Through designing two concrete attacks, we identify two serious security flaws in their scheme. 1) First, we show that their scheme is insecure because in their scheme any authenticated user can freely tamper with the weight of his own attribute to gain higher level decryption privilege to arbitrarily decrypt the ciphertext belonging to another user with higher weight of attribute. 2) Second, we further demonstrate that their scheme is trivial insecure because in their scheme even any malicious authenticated user’s attribute does not match the access policy of a ciphertext, he/she still has the power to decrypt the ciphertext, i.e., the decryption power is independent of attributes, thus, their scheme is not a rigorous attribute-based scheme. The two weaknesses discovered may hinder their scheme infeasible for practical deployment. Accordingly, we present a remedy solution to the issues while preserving all the security features of the original scheme. We hope that our cryptoanalysis and remedy scheme may contribute to avoiding similar design flaws in future designs.

In 2016, Peng et al. pointed out in the literature (IEEE Transactions on Services Computing, Vol. 9, No. 6, pp. 996-998, Nov./Dec. 2016) that Wang's identity-based provable data possessing scheme ID-DPDP(IEEE Transactions on Services Computing, vol. 8, no. 2, pp. 328-340, Mar./Apr. 2015) has security vulnerability, and Peng et al. offered the remedy solutions. Unfortunately, we demonstrate that Peng et al.'s method also has a security loophole that malicious cloud servers can produce valid proof information without original data. Accordingly, we provide a revised solution to the problem while preserving the security features of the ID-DPDP.

In this paper, we present a new efficient authenticated key agreement protocol. Compared with other cross-domain protocols which are all in the same cryptosystem, our protocol is innovatively designed to shift between the Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) and the Identity-based Cryptosystem (IBC). This protocol combined with heterogeneous signcryption method is proved to satisfy confidentiality and unforgeability on the basis of the assumptions of Computational Diffie-Hellman problem (CDHP) and Bilinear Diffie-Hellman problem (BDHP) in the authentication phases, and it simultaneously guarantees the ciphertext anonymity. In addition, it can efficiently resist kinds of active attacks such as known-session key attack, key forge attack, and known-temporary secret key attack. Compared with other two-party authenticated key agreement protocols, the newly proposed key agreement protocol has better security, practicability and efficiency.

Abstract In recent years, secure communication and privacy‐preserving are gaining popularity because of the advent of wireless network. Certificateless cryptography (CLC) and identity‐based cryptography (IBC) have already been widely applied in the area of wireless network. Hence, to achieve secure communication from CLC to IBC, we present a heterogeneous signcryption scheme that enables a sender in the CLC to transmit a message to multi‐receiver in the IBC. Our scheme has no restrictions on the system parameters and master keys; private key generator and key generating center generate their own system parameters and master key for the IBC users and the CLC user, separately. Considering privacy‐preserving in heterogeneous communication, we show that our scheme can realize the anonymity of all receivers. Compared with other schemes, our scheme has more advantages, such as public verification and decryption fairness, which are attractive for wireless network applications. Moreover, our scheme has the indistinguishability against adaptive chosen ciphertext attacks, the existential unforgeability against adaptive chosen messages attacks, and anonymous indistinguishability of encryptions under selective‐ID, chosen ciphertext attack in the random oracle model. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.