A Pairing-Free Heterogeneous Signcryption Scheme for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

During the past few years, as Internet of Things develops rapidly, the applications of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) technology have been increasingly widely used. Meanwhile, the efficiency and security issues of UAV communication have brought about widespread attention of many researchers in different fields. In an open wireless network, the attacks on UAV communication mainly include eavesdropping, tampering, interrupting, forgery, etc. Signcryption is an appropriate method to address these security problems. However, the existing signcryption schemes are not suitable for UAVs with limited resources and ground station (GS) that needs to process a large number of messages from UAVs. Moreover, in a certain area, UAVs and a GS may belong to different cryptosystems. Therefore, in this article, we came up with a heterogeneous signcryption scheme for UAVs to communicate to a GS (HSC-U2G) without bilinear pairing operation, where UAVs belong to identity-based cryptography (IBC) while the GS belongs to public-key infrastructure (PKI). Moreover, our scheme provides identity privacy for UAVs and supports batch verification for the GS. Using the random oracle model, we demonstrate HSC-U2G can achieve insider security for confidentiality as well as unforgeability. After that, HSC-U2G is compared with several important related works and we provide all experimental results to show the efficiency.