The integration of advanced communication technologies with modern vehicular systems has driven the evolution of vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs). These networks enable a seamless exchange of road safety information between vehicles and traffic management authorities via wireless links. However, the open nature of these communication channels introduces significant risks to the privacy and security of transmitted messages. To address these challenges, Liet al. (IEEE Trans. Inf. Forensics and Security, vol. 19, pp. 9629–9642, 2024) proposed a lattice-based authentication scheme designed for fog-assisted VANETs. This protocol utilizes lattice cryptography to ensure resilience against quantum attacks and employs fog computing to tackle scalability issues. Despite these advancements, a detailed analysis uncovers several vulnerabilities and inefficiencies in their design. This study identifies an anonymity disclosure attack on Liet al.’s scheme, compromising its privacy guarantees. In addition, redundancies in the signature generation process impose excessive computational burdens on resource-constrained vehicular devices. To address these shortcomings, this work introduces a lattice-based anonymous batch-verifiable authentication (LBABVA) scheme. Rigorous security analysis proves the scheme’s security in the random oracle model, while efficiency evaluations reveal significant improvements. The proposed scheme reduces the computational cost of the signing phase to 14.57% and the signature verification phase to 83.99% of the corresponding costs of the previous design, highlighting its superior performance and suitability for practical applications.

Recent development of smart cities includes advanced and necessary use of modern smart grid (SG), than the traditional power grid. The paradigm of SG has also transformed houses into a home area networks (HAN). In HAN, several smart devices and appliances are connected to the electricity control centers (ECC). Appliances share their load and consumption related information to ECC through smart meters. The consumption data may be used for supply-demand management, for example, by ramping production up or down as needed. However, security and privacy of the consumers data are greatly important, since fine-grained smart meter data may reveal an users presence/absence in his/her house. To address this issue, several public-key-based or identity-based data aggregation schemes have been proposed in the literature. However, most of such schemes either suffer from the complexity of certificate management or key escrow problem. To eliminate these issues, in this paper we propose an efficient certificate-based data aggregation (CB-DA) scheme. In the proposed CB-DA scheme, the owner selects a secret key and then use the secret key along with certificates as decryption/signing keys.

The advent of the Internet of Things (IoT) has escalated the sharing of information among various smart devices many fold, irrespective of their geographical location. Recently, applications, such as e-healthcare, farm monitoring, border security, smart transportation, etc. have attracted wide attention from the research community. However, as devices in the Industrial-IoT (IIoT) environment share their information using the Internet, security issues, such as authentication, integrity, and confidentiality of data pose various challenges to the research community for the successful implementation of any solution. To handle these issues, several digital signature-based schemes have been designed in the past. However, because of the usage of the identity-based public-key cryptography (IDPKC) or certificate-less-based public-key cryptography (CLPKC), these schemes suffer from key escrow or secret key distribution problems. To eliminate these flaws, this article presents a short digital signature scheme without pairing in certificate-based setting with aggregation in IIoT environment. Besides, in IIoT environment, communication and computational costs are also considered as imperative challenges. In this regard, the pairing free construction, short length signature and aggregation make it a communication and computational efficient signature scheme. The performance comparison of the proposed scheme shows that our scheme causes less computational overhead and takes significantly less execution time as compared to the existing schemes, which is imperative for the resource limited IIoT devices. We also demonstrate that signature aggregation and verification cost is 6.67(n+2) ms which is much less in comparison to the verification cost ( 20.01n ms) of n short signatures.

The notion of aggregation of data in Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) environment is a common practice. It shortens the data and associated signatures to reduce the bandwidth requirement. The compact aggregate signature (CAS) scheme creates a constant length aggregate signature (AS). Thus, the length of the CAS is independent of the number of messages or signatures to be aggregated. This article presents the first pairing-free CAS scheme in certificate-based settings. Due to the certificate-based approach, the proposed scheme is free from key escrow and key distribution problems inherited in identity-based cryptography (IDC) and certificate-less cryptography (CLC), respectively. Being compact and pairing free, it is the least bandwidth-consuming and the most efficient provably secure aggregation method. The length and computational cost analysis show that the scheme is the most appealing to use in the IIoT environment.

Blind signature (BS) schemes are a vital tool to design electronic cash (e‐cash), online transaction, electronic voting (e‐voting), digital right management (DRM) systems etc. The communication systems designed for such applications need small size and more confidential signature schemes. This article presents the first provably secure and efficient identity‐based message recovery BS scheme from pairing. Since, in this scheme, the message is not transmitted with signature and recovered during verification phase, the total message–signature length is the lowest. Due to the blindness, the scheme provides authentication along with anonymity. The performance comparison shows that the authors' scheme consumes the lowest computation cost. Thus, it inspires the energy efficient (green) technology as well as is the most appealing BS scheme towards applications such as e‐cash, e‐voting, DRM systems etc. using low bandwidth and high security.