Multi-Heterogeneous Signcryption Scheme for Next Generation Slicing Networking

With the advent of 5G and the forthcoming 6G networks, network slicing has emerged as a pivotal technology to address the diverse and dynamic communication needs of modern systems. It enables the creation of multiple virtual networks over a shared physical infrastructure, optimizing resource utilization and providing tailored services. However, due to the security and service requirements of different slices, different network slicings usually adopt different public key cryptosystems, that is, heterogeneous network slicing, which inevitably leads to security challenges in data transmission of heterogeneous network devices. To address this, this paper proposes a generalized multi-heterogeneous signcryption scheme (MHSC) for network slicing, which ensures secure and efficient data transmission among devices utilizing three widely adopted public key cryptography systems: Public Key Infrastructure (PKI), Identity-Based Cryptography (IBC), and Certificateless Cryptography (CLC). Based mathematically hard problems, MHSC achieves multiple security properties, including forward secrecy and public verifiability, ensuring a higher level of security. In computational and communication efficiency, MHSC is evaluated through both theoretical analysis and simulation experiments. The results demonstrate that MHSC can improve computational efficiency by 17.66% and communication efficiency by 5.94% on average, offering a scalable and efficient solution for secure data transmission in heterogeneous network slicings.