An anonymous and efficient certificateless signature scheme based on blockchain in NDN‐IoT environments

Abstract The Named Data Networking (NDN) architecture, known for its caching strategies and name‐based routing, is an exemplary paradigm for content distribution across Internet of Things (IoT) devices. In the environment of NDN‐IoT, there is an urgent demand for a lightweight signature authentication scheme suitable for terminal devices to ensure the integrity of Data packets and the legitimacy of their sources. Many researchers opt for employing certificateless public key cryptography measures to enhance the security of communication among terminal devices in NDN‐IoT. However, among the array of proposed solutions, issues such as lack of resistance against signer identity exposure, susceptibility to man‐in‐the‐middle attacks, and replay attacks persist. Some researchers advocate for partitioning the devices in NDN‐IoT into different zones, yet there remains a deficiency in the design of packet exchange mechanisms across distinct zones. To address these issues, this paper proposes a novel blockchain‐based certificate‐less signature scheme in the NDN‐IoT environment that integrates key features such as distributed legitimate producer management, inter‐domain interaction mechanisms, anonymous identity protection, and blockchain storage optimization. The overarching goal is to provide robust security services for resource‐constrained devices within the NDN infrastructure while ensuring authenticity and integrity of data packets while alleviating the burden of certificate management on end devices. Compared to similar existing solutions, our proposed method incurs only 34% of the computational overhead required for Data packet signature verification, while maintaining equivalent cache occupancy and achieving higher security performance.