Efficient Anonymous Certificate-Based Multi- Message and Multi-Receiver Signcryption Scheme for Healthcare Internet of Things

Healthcare Internet of Things (IoT) is an emerging paradigm, which can provide comprehensive and different types of health services and enable various types of medical sensors to monitor patient’s health conditions. In the healthcare IoT, patient is deployed with a variety of medical sensors, which continuously monitors and collects patient’s sensitive health data that needs specially protection for preventing privacy leakage. To safely send multiple different health data monitored by multiple different medical sensors to multiple corresponding healthcare professionals in one data report, several multi-message and multi-receiver signcryption schemes have been introduced by employing the traditional public key cryptography, identity-based cryptography or certificateless cryptography. However, these schemes suffer from the certificate management, key escrow and key distribution problem. Besides, due to the resource-constraint property of medical sensors, they are unsuitable for healthcare IoT in terms of both performance and privacy requirements. To solve these issues, this paper introduces an efficient anonymous certificate-based multi-message and multi-receiver signcryption scheme for healthcare IoT, where the certificate-based cryptography and elliptic curve cryptography are combined to simplify the certificate management problem, eliminate the key escrow problem, solve the key distribution problem and ensure the privacy-preserving. Furthermore, the security analysis suggests that the proposed scheme is able to achieve the confidentiality, unforgeability, receiver anonymity, sender anonymity and decryption fairness; the performance evaluation indicates that the proposed scheme brings to the lower computation cost and communication cost in comparison to the existing schemes.