Proxy re-signature enables transitive authentication of digital identities across different domains and has significant application value in areas such as digital rights management, cross-domain certificate validation, and distributed system access control. However, most existing proxy re-signature schemes, which are predominantly based on traditional public-key cryptosystems, face security vulnerabilities and certificate management bottlenecks. While identity-based schemes alleviate some issues, they introduce key escrow concerns. Certificateless schemes effectively resolve both certificate management and key escrow problems but remain vulnerable to quantum computing threats. To address these limitations, this paper constructs an efficient post-quantum certificateless proxy re-signature scheme based on algebraic lattices. Building upon algebraic lattice theory and leveraging the Dilithium algorithm, our scheme innovatively employs a lattice basis reduction-assisted parameter selection strategy to mitigate the potential algebraic attack vectors inherent in the NTRU lattice structure. This ensures the security and integrity of multi-party communication in quantum-threat environments. Furthermore, the scheme significantly reduces computational overhead and optimizes signature storage complexity through structured compression techniques, facilitating deployment on resource-constrained devices like Internet of Things (IoT) terminals. We formally prove the unforgeability of the scheme under the adaptive chosen-message attack model, with its security reducible to the hardness of the corresponding underlying lattice problems.
Proxy re-signature enables transitive authentication of digital identities across different domains and has significant application value in areas such as digital rights management, cross-domain certificate validation, and distributed system access control. However, most existing proxy re-signature schemes, which are predominantly based on traditional public-key cryptosystems, face security vulnerabilities and certificate management bottlenecks. While identity-based schemes alleviate some issues, they introduce key escrow concerns. Certificateless schemes effectively resolve both certificate management and key escrow problems but remain vulnerable to quantum computing threats. To address these limitations, this paper constructs an efficient post-quantum certificateless proxy re-signature scheme based on algebraic lattices. Building upon algebraic lattice theory and leveraging the Dilithium algorithm, our scheme innovatively employs a lattice basis reduction-assisted parameter selection strategy to mitigate the potential algebraic attack vectors inherent in the NTRU lattice structure. This ensures the security and integrity of multi-party communication in quantum-threat environments. Furthermore, the scheme significantly reduces computational overhead and optimizes signature storage complexity through structured compression techniques, facilitating deployment on resource-constrained devices like Internet of Things (IoT) terminals. We formally prove the unforgeability of the scheme under the adaptive chosen-message attack model, with its security reducible to the hardness of the corresponding underlying lattice problems.
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 enormous benefits of Internet of Things (IoT) technology have driven its deployment in various applications. Additionally, the development of quantum computers has directed attention towards lattice-based cryptography. Consequently, the computational capabilities of quantum computers pose a threat to the security of the existing IoT signature mechanisms. Quantum computers are proficient at unraveling the complexity bound of computationally hard problems like the integer factorization problem (IFP) and the discrete logarithm problem (DLP). As a result, security is an essential requirement for the IoT communication network against quantum attacks. The amalgamation of certificateless public key cryptosystems (CL-PKC) and lattice-based cryptography (LBC) is one of the solution for alleviating these security menaces. Lucidly, CL-PKC prevents key escrow issues and key management problems; LBC prevents quantum attacks. The Shortest Integer Solution (SIS) problem, which the NTRU lattices offer, serves as the basis for this paper’s introduction of a certificateless signature mechanism for IoT environments. By adopting the Random Oracle Model, we demonstrated the security of the suggested mechanism against Type 1 and Type 2 attackers. Furthermore, security analysis and performance evaluation demonstrate robust communication, as evidenced by metrics such as the computational cost of CL-Sign and CL-Verify phases at 536μs, 376.81μs and communication cost of KGC at 418 bits, CL-Sign at 532 bits and CL-Verify at 446 bits. Also, we calculate the cost of single-message signature generation and verification on an IoT device. These results show that the suggested mechanism’s security and computational efficiency are more reliable, and efficient than other relevant competing frameworks.
The Edge-enabled Industrial Internet of Things (Edge-IIoT) has emerged as a fundamental architecture for intelligent manufacturing by enabling low-latency data collection, processing, and communication among distributed industrial devices. However, the open and distributed nature of Edge-IIoT introduces significant challenges to secure data authentication and privacy preservation. Meanwhile, conventional public key infrastructure incurs considerable certificate management overhead and is not well suited for future industrial environments in the presence of quantum computing. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a lattice-based certificateless blind signature scheme for secure and privacy-preserving authentication in Edge-IIoT. The proposed scheme integrates the Dilithium signature algorithm with certificateless public key cryptography and blind signature techniques to simultaneously provide anonymous authentication, data integrity, conditional identity revocation, and post-quantum security while eliminating the certificate management overhead associated with traditional public key infrastructures. Furthermore, the proposed construction improves existing lattice-based certificateless blind signature schemes by addressing identified security weaknesses and strengthening resistance against forgery attacks, while effectively avoiding the key escrow problem inherent in identity-based cryptography. The correctness, blindness, and unforgeability of the proposed scheme are formally proved in the random oracle model based on the hardness of the Module Short Integer Solution (MSIS) problem. In addition, theoretical performance analysis demonstrates that the proposed scheme incurs acceptable computational, communication, and storage overhead while providing comprehensive security properties, including certificateless operation, identity anonymity, no key escrow, conditional revocation, and post-quantum security. Overall, the proposed scheme achieves an effective balance between security, privacy preservation, and efficiency, which exhibits favorable theoretical security-efficiency trade-offs for secure industrial data authentication in resource-constrained Edge-IIoT environments. Practical implementation is left for future investigation.
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.
A lightweight, robust, and efficient security mechanism is necessary to combat quantum-generation threats across multiple domains, including healthcare, transportation, and industrial automation, in the Internet of Things (IoT). Post-quantum cryptography has emerged in response to the increasing vulnerability of traditional cryptographic methods, such as RSA and ECC, to quantum attacks. Taking advantage of the hardness of Short Integer Solutions (SIS) and Learning with Errors (LWE), we propose a lattice-based signature scheme for IoT applications. A computationally efficient IoT device model that maintains authenticated, integrity, and anonymity is proposed. The scheme has the advantage of being faster and more efficient than existing key size schemes such as IBS, CLS, and FALCON, according to a detailed security assessment. The proposed scheme maintains practical deployment ability while reducing post-quantum security in IoT ecosystems.
Proxy signature is one of the important primitives of public-key cryptography and plays an essential role in delivering security services in modern communications. However, existing post quantum proxy signature schemes with larger signature sizes might not be fully practical for some resource-constrained devices (e.g., Internet of Things devices). A signature scheme with message recovery has the characteristic that part or all of the message is embedded in the signature, which can reduce the size of the signature. In this paper, we present a new identity-based proxy signature scheme over an NTRU lattice with message recovery (IB-PSSMR), which is more efficient than the other existing identity-based proxy signature schemes in terms of the size of the signature and the cost of energy. We prove that our scheme is secure under a Short Integer Solution (SIS) assumption that is as hard as approximating several worst-case lattice problems in the random oracle model. We also discussed some application scenarios of IB-PSSMR in blockchain and Internet of Things (IOT). This paper provides a new idea for the design of lattice signature schemes in low resource constrained environments.