An efficient and secure scheme for smart home communication using identity-based signcryption

Securing communication between users and devices is an important aspect of Internet of Things applications. Although a number of cryptographic schemes have been proposed for securing communication among IoT devices, the ability to handle such schemes, especially with devices that have constrained computing resources, is difficult. Thus, there is a need for a secure and efficient scheme that will protect connections between devices with limited capabilities. For overcoming such constraints, many symmetric and asymmetric cryptographic techniques have been proposed. However, not all of the available cryptographic mechanisms can satisfy all of the security goals. Fortunately, there is a single mechanism that can provide combined security goals with low cost in terms of computation and communication overhead in addition to memory requirement. This technique, known as signcryption, can more efficiently satisfy authentication, integrity and confidentiality than combining encryption and signature schemes. This paper presents an identity-based signcryption scheme for smart home communication. Analysis and evaluation show that, in addition to efficiently providing authentication, the proposed scheme provides integrity and confidentiality as well as the ability to protect communication between devices against possible attacks.