Practical Heterogeneous Pairing-Free Signcryption Scheme for Internet of Medical Things Communications with Edge Computing

Internet of Medical Things technology is becoming popular because of recent advancements in sensor node technology. A sensor node is characterized as a resource-limited device. This characteristic has led to several security challenges that underpin the necessity for cryptosystems that are both more effective and robust in protecting vital data. We propose an efficient and secure access control scheme where the transmitting node and receiving node are in certificateless cryptography and identity-based cryptographic environment, respectively. The design of the access control protocol for use in Internet of Medical Things with mobile edge computing is based on a heterogeneous signcryption scheme, and it is supported by 5G network. Random oracle model was used to provide the security proof of the proposed scheme. The proposed heterogeneous access control scheme provides public verifiability and ciphertext authentication properties. In addition, we have compared the efficiency of our access control scheme with other related existing schemes, and our scheme has low energy consumption and computation cost. Received: 11 April 2024 | Revised: 22 July 2024 | Accepted: 16 August 2024 Conflicts of Interest The authors declare that they have no conflicts of interest to this work. Data Availability Statement The data that support this work are available upon reasonable request to the corresponding author. Author Contribution Statement Philemon Nthenge Kasyoka: Conceptualization, Software, Formal analysis, Investigation, Resources, Writing - original draft, Visualization, Supervision, Project administration. Anyembe Andrew Omala: Methodology, Validation, Formal analysis, Resources, Writing - review & editing, Visualization.