ECGSH: An Efficient Certificateless Group Signcryption-Based Homomorphic in Industrial IoT

With the growth of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), millions of smart devices are transmitting and processing data globally. However, this extensive interconnectivity also poses significant security challenges, particularly in data transmission. Traditional security mechanisms often incur high computational costs and long processing times, which are impractical for resource-constrained devices. In this paper, we propose an efficient and secure data processing and transmission scheme for the IIoT called ECGSH. This scheme combines certificateless signcryption and homomorphic encryption to enable homomorphic processing in an encrypted state, thus enhancing both security and flexibility. Moreover, it reduces the complexity of large-scale data processing by eliminating bilinear pair computations. The ECGSH scheme also supports homomorphic data transmission in the IIoT. A rigorous security analysis proves that the scheme has the properties of confidentiality, non-repudiation, and forward security under the random oracle model. An attack resistance analysis proves that the scheme can effectively resist man-in-the-middle (MITM) attacks, replay attacks, and eavesdropping attacks. The performance evaluation demonstrates that ECGSH excels in terms of security, computational efficiency, and communication overhead. It requires at most 31% CPU utilization, and less than 1.2% memory footprint on IIoT hardware, making it particularly suitable for IIoT environments with limited resources and high transmission costs.