Efficient and secure post-quantum certificateless signcryption with linkability for IoMT

Abstract

The Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) has gained significant research focus in both academic and medical institutions. Nevertheless, the sensitive data involved in IoMT raises concerns regarding user validation and data privacy. To address these concerns, certificateless signcryption (CLSC) has emerged as a promising solution, offering authenticity, confidentiality, and unforgeability. Unfortunately, most existing CLSC schemes are impractical for IoMT due to their heavy computational and storage requirements. Additionally, these schemes are vulnerable to quantum computing attacks. Therefore, research focusing on designing an efficient post-quantum CLSC scheme is still far-reaching. In this work, we propose PQ-CLSCL, a novel postquantum CLSC scheme with linkability for IoMT. Our proposed design facilitates secure transmission of medical data between physicians and patients, effectively validating user legitimacy and minimizing the risk of private information leakage. To achieve this, we leverage lattice sampling algorithms and hash functions to generate the partial secret key, then employ the sign-then-encrypt method and design a link label. We also formalize and prove the security of our design, including indistinguishability against chosen-ciphertext attacks (IND-CCA2), existential unforgeability against chosen-message attacks (EU-CMA), and linkability. Finally, through comprehensive performance evaluation, our computation overhead is just 5% of other existing schemes. The evaluation results demonstrate that our solution is practical and efficient.