The Edge-computing era presents opportunities for the rapid development of the Internet of Things (IoT), where identity authentication is fundamental to ensuring IoT security. However, under post-quantum attacks, traditional identity authentication schemes that rely on signcryption to generate node keys face challenges due to the high number of IoT nodes. These schemes consume significant resources, making it difficult to meet the low-cost requirements of IoT. Against the backdrop of the rapid development of new media and the increasingly growing security demands for resource-constrained consumer electronic edge devices, a lightweight group signcryption authentication scheme based on lattice cryptography is proposed. During the key generation phase, an improved trapdoor diagonal matrix is designed, optimizing the preimage sampling algorithm required for key generation and reducing the total time needed to generate multiple keys. In the identity authentication phase, based on the leftover hash lemma and the properties of signcryption, the scheme allows for simultaneous signing and encryption of messages in a single logical step. A low-interaction protocol combining dot products and hash operations is proposed, enabling group leaders to perform access authentication on behalf of group members. Simulation results show that the scheme reduces the number of interactions required for IoT device access, lowers computational costs during identity authentication, and reduces the total cost of signcryption and un-signcryption by at least 7% compared to existing schemes. Additionally, it is demonstrated that this scheme can resist post-quantum attacks in IoT environments.
The Edge-computing era presents opportunities for the rapid development of the Internet of Things (IoT), where identity authentication is fundamental to ensuring IoT security. However, under post-quantum attacks, traditional identity authentication schemes that rely on signcryption to generate node keys face challenges due to the high number of IoT nodes. These schemes consume significant resources, making it difficult to meet the low-cost requirements of IoT. Against the backdrop of the rapid development of new media and the increasingly growing security demands for resource-constrained consumer electronic edge devices, a lightweight group signcryption authentication scheme based on lattice cryptography is proposed. During the key generation phase, an improved trapdoor diagonal matrix is designed, optimizing the preimage sampling algorithm required for key generation and reducing the total time needed to generate multiple keys. In the identity authentication phase, based on the leftover hash lemma and the properties of signcryption, the scheme allows for simultaneous signing and encryption of messages in a single logical step. A low-interaction protocol combining dot products and hash operations is proposed, enabling group leaders to perform access authentication on behalf of group members. Simulation results show that the scheme reduces the number of interactions required for IoT device access, lowers computational costs during identity authentication, and reduces the total cost of signcryption and un-signcryption by at least 7% compared to existing schemes. Additionally, it is demonstrated that this scheme can resist post-quantum attacks in IoT environments.
With the rapid expansion of consumer electronics and the Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystem, ensuring secure communication in resource-constrained edge devices has become a critical challenge, especially under the threat of quantum attacks. Although lattice-based cryptographic schemes provide post-quantum security, they often suffer from large key storage and high computational overhead, limiting their applicability in edge environments. To address these challenges, we propose an identity-based linkable ring signcryption scheme constructed on the post quantum Lattice cryptography, tailored for edge-enabled IoT systems. The scheme employs a trapdoor generation algorithm to establish the master keys, utilizes compact Gaussian sampling to derive private keys for ring members, and integrates rejection sampling to generate user signatures with strong anonymity. Furthermore, a key encapsulation mechanism ensures identity protection during encryption. Security analysis under the Random Oracle Model (ROM) demonstrates the scheme's resistance to forgery and its linkability property. Performance evaluation shows that the proposed approach achieves smaller public keys, reduced encryption/decryption costs, and enhanced efficiency, making it well-suited for lightweight IoT and consumer electronics applications in the post-quantum era.
The rapid expansion of the Internet of Things (IoT) has led to an unprecedented scale of data exchange across heterogeneous and resource-constrained devices. Ensuring confidentiality and secure key management in such environments is challenging. Traditional public-key infrastructures require heavy certificate-handling overhead. Identity-Based Encryption (IBE) offers a lightweight alternative by deriving public keys directly from device identities, making it attractive for IoT deployments. However, IoT devices are highly vulnerable to side-channel and key-extraction attacks, motivating the need for Forward-Secure IBE(FS-IBE), where the compromise of a current secret key does not threaten past communications. Existing FS-IBE constructions based on classical hardness assumptions are not secure in the era of post-quantum, while the lattice-based (LWE-based) forward-secure scheme suffer from large key and ciphertext sizes, limiting their suitability for constrained IoT systems. Here, we propose a new lattice-based fs-IBE scheme in the ring setting, relying on the RLWE assumption to achieve post-quantum security and significant efficiency gains. Our design uses trapdoor delegation with a minimal-cover mechanism over a binary tree. It results in compact public parameters and efficient per-epoch key updates. Compared to prior LWE-based constructions, our scheme reduces public key, secret key, and ciphertext sizes, and thus, making it better suited for practical IoT environments.
Internet of Things (IoT) is one of the most representative application scenarios in the 5G and 6G era. The concurrent access of massive IoT devices definitely poses enormous communication, computation, and certificate management challenges to the wireless authentication. Moreover, the emergence of quantum computing makes classical cryptography-based authentication protocols, such as 5G-AKA, more easier to be broken. Facing the challenges posed by the massive concurrent authentication and quantum attacks, this paper proposes a lattice cryptography based group authentication scheme, where lattice-based aggregate signature algorithm and identity-based encryption (IBE) are leveraged to achieve simultaneous authentication of concurrent accessed devices. The proposed authentication scheme eliminates the process of public key certificate management, greatly reducing the storage overhead of core network. Moreover, the utilization of lattice cryptography enables the resistance of quantum attacks. The proposed solution does not rely on additional security assumptions such as security channel or trusted group center, making it more flexible to be deployed in actual network scenario. Finally, formal security analysis of the proposed protocol is provided with the tool ProVerif. It is demonstrated that the proposed protocol can satisfy the goals of identity privacy, authentication, data confidentiality and forward secrecy. In addition, compared with existing advanced solutions, the outperformance of the proposed scheme in terms of computation overhead, signaling overhead, communication overhead, and security properties is validated with simulations.
The emergence and growth of the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) have transformed the way healthcare services are delivered, but this growth comes with its own security challenges, especially with the emergence of quantum computing. This paper presents a lightweight, privacy-preserving authentication scheme for edge-based IoMT environments, integrating CRYSTALS-Kyber Key Encapsulation Mechanism (KEM) to securely establish session keys between participating entities and resilience against quantum attacks, while CRYSTALS-Dilithium is utilized as the digital signature scheme to ensure message integrity, authentication, and non-repudiation. These NIST-standardized post-quantum primitives collectively strengthen the system's resistance against quantum adversaries and enhance overall cryptographic robustness. The proposed system comprises two phases: Registration and Authentication. During registration, patients, wearable devices that utilize Physically Unclonable Functions (PUFs), and medical specialists register with a Trusted Authority via edge nodes. The authentication phase encompasses mutual authentication among patients, devices, medical specialists, edge nodes, and cloud servers, ensuring that only authorized entities access sensitive health information. In addition, the proposed scheme employs the formal security properties, such as authenticity and secrecy, are verified using the AVISPA tool under the Dolev-Yao model, with results confirming that all defined goals are achieved and no attacks are found. Performance evaluations indicate that the scheme is computationally efficient and suitable for resource-constrained IoMT devices. Furthermore, BAN logic is employed to formally verify the correctness of the authentication protocol, demonstrating that mutual authentication is securely established among the participating entities under well-defined trust assumptions. By integrating post-quantum cryptographic techniques, this authentication framework addresses emerging security challenges posed by quantum computing, aligning with the objectives of enhancing edge-based consumer electronics devices and Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystems with post-quantum cryptosystems.
The rapid proliferation of IoT technology has brought billions of devices into play that need to operate in a variety of diverse, resource-constrained environments. Secure authentication among these devices is a critical challenge, as traditional certificate-based public key infrastructures incur heavy computation and management overhead. Moreover, recent breakthroughs in quantum computing put at risk the security of classical cryptographic algorithms commonly used in IoT systems. This paper proposes a post-quantum certificateless authentication framework designed to address the efficiency-long-term security requirements of IoT environments. The proposed framework uses lattice-based cryptography to resist quantum-enabled adversaries while eliminating the need for digital certificates. The certificateless approach evades the problem of key escrow of identity-based cryptography and simplifies the key management process. A lightweight authentication protocol, which is suitable for constrained IoT devices, is developed. Security analyses prove that our proposed framework resists common attacks such as impersonation, replay, and man-in-the-middle attacks. The performance evaluation shows that our proposed framework reduces the communication and computational overheads compared with the traditional certificatebased authentication schemes. In this way, it is appropriate for large-scale and futureproof deployments of IoT systems.
The rapid expansion of Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystems has introduced significant security challenges due to resource-constrained devices, heterogeneous network architectures, and largescale connectivity. Traditional authentication and key exchange mechanisms, primarily based on classical cryptographic algorithms such as RSA and ECC, are vulnerable to future quantum computing attacks. The emergence of quantum algorithms, particularly Shor’s algorithm, threatens the long-term confidentiality and integrity of IoT communications. This paper proposes a Quantum-Resistant Authentication and Key Exchange Protocol specifically designed for secure IoT architectures. The proposed framework integrates post-quantum cryptographic primitives, including lattice-based key exchange mechanisms and hash-based authentication schemes, optimized for low computational overhead suitable for constrained IoT devices. The protocol ensures mutual authentication, forward secrecy, and resistance against quantum adversaries while maintaining minimal communication latency. Security analysis demonstrates robustness against replay, man-in-the-middle, and key-compromise attacks. Performance evaluation shows that the proposed solution achieves a balance between quantum security strength and resource efficiency, making it suitable for next-generation IoT deployments in smart cities, healthcare systems, and industrial automation.