A Lightweight Certificateless Edge-Assisted Encryption for IoT Devices: Enhancing Security and Performance

In edge computing environments, the rapid growth of Internet of Things (IoT) devices presents significant challenges for data processing. These devices are often resource-constrained, leading to a tradeoff between achieving efficiency and ensuring security. On one hand, traditional certificateless encryption methods are computationally expensive; on the other hand, offloading the computational load to third-party entities can enhance efficiency but still introduces security risks. To address these issues, this article proposes a novel lightweight certificateless edge-assisted encryption scheme (CL-EAED). Ours scheme offloads computationally intensive tasks to edge servers, ensuring that edge-assisted processing does not expose sensitive information and only needs to be performed once. This approach effectively prevents data leakage and enhances both the efficiency and security of task offloading. Moreover, the CL-EAED scheme achieves IND-CCA security in standard model (SM) and has been validated using the ProVerif tool. Experimental evaluations demonstrate that CL-EAED eliminates the dependency on computationally intensive pairing operations, significantly reducing computational and communication costs. It outperforms existing solutions in terms of energy consumption, latency, and scalability, fully meeting the requirements of practical applications.