Lightweight Traceable Data Circulation Encryption Scheme for Edge Computing

ABSTRACT With the increasing demand for secure and efficient data circulation in edge computing environments, ensuring data privacy, integrity, and traceability has become a critical challenge. In such decentralized and untrusted settings, traditional encryption schemes often suffer from key management complexity, single points of failure, and high computational costs. To address these issues, this paper proposes a lightweight and traceable data circulation encryption (LTP‐CLE) scheme tailored for edge computing scenarios. The scheme leverages certificateless encryption to eliminate the dependency on a trusted key generation center (KGC), and integrates a proxy re‐encryption mechanism and a digital signature scheme using a unified key structure. This unified design not only enhances security and traceability but also reduces key management overhead. Furthermore, the scheme minimizes the use of expensive cryptographic operations, such as bilinear pairings and scalar multiplications, thereby improving computational efficiency. Security analysis in the random oracle model demonstrates the scheme's resistance to collision attacks, ciphertext indistinguishability, and signature forgery. Experimental evaluations show that the LTP‐CLE scheme outperforms existing methods in both computational and communication efficiency, making it well‐suited for practical deployment in data‐centric edge computing applications such as IoT‐based healthcare monitoring, industrial control, and smart city infrastructure.