The demand for continuous time-series data sharing in Internet of Things (IoT) scenarios has been increasing. Traditional Certificateless Signcryption (CLSC) schemes based on bilinear pairings or elliptic curves offer limited security under quantum computing threats and incur high computational and communication overheads when repeatedly signcrypting multiple data segments. To address these issues, this paper proposes a post-quantum lightweight certificateless hybrid signcryption scheme tailored for time-series data sharing. First, a bidirectional hash chain-driven symmetric key generation and management mechanism is designed to enable rapid key generation for multiple consecutive data segments while ensuring forward and backward security. Subsequently, a lightweight hybrid signcryption scheme with conditional privacy protection is constructed using a module lattice framework. Combined with an offline/online separation that shifts part of the computation ahead of time, the scheme achieves post-quantum security while significantly reducing the burden on end devices and communication links. The scheme is proven to satisfy IND-CCA confidentiality and EUF-CMA unforgeability in a random oracle model. Prototype implementation and evaluation on resource-constrained terminal devices show that, the proposed scheme achieves significant advantages: on average, the end-side overall latency and transmission volume can be reduced to approximately 40% of those of comparable post-quantum schemes. The advantages of this scheme become even more pronounced in long-duration continuous time-series data scenarios. It effectively balances post-quantum security, lightweight design, and scalability, making it well-suited for time-series data sharing applications in next-generation intelligent IoT.
The demand for continuous time-series data sharing in Internet of Things (IoT) scenarios has been increasing. Traditional Certificateless Signcryption (CLSC) schemes based on bilinear pairings or elliptic curves offer limited security under quantum computing threats and incur high computational and communication overheads when repeatedly signcrypting multiple data segments. To address these issues, this paper proposes a post-quantum lightweight certificateless hybrid signcryption scheme tailored for time-series data sharing. First, a bidirectional hash chain-driven symmetric key generation and management mechanism is designed to enable rapid key generation for multiple consecutive data segments while ensuring forward and backward security. Subsequently, a lightweight hybrid signcryption scheme with conditional privacy protection is constructed using a module lattice framework. Combined with an offline/online separation that shifts part of the computation ahead of time, the scheme achieves post-quantum security while significantly reducing the burden on end devices and communication links. The scheme is proven to satisfy IND-CCA confidentiality and EUF-CMA unforgeability in a random oracle model. Prototype implementation and evaluation on resource-constrained terminal devices show that, the proposed scheme achieves significant advantages: on average, the end-side overall latency and transmission volume can be reduced to approximately 40% of those of comparable post-quantum schemes. The advantages of this scheme become even more pronounced in long-duration continuous time-series data scenarios. It effectively balances post-quantum security, lightweight design, and scalability, making it well-suited for time-series data sharing applications in next-generation intelligent IoT.
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 post-quantum 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.
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 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-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.
The rapid development of quantum computing presents a substantial threat to traditional cryptographic algorithms, particularly those relying on mathematical problems such as integer factorization and elliptic curve operations. As a response, the cryptographic community has accelerated the design of post-quantum cryptographic schemes that can withstand attacks from both classical and quantum computers. However, many of these new schemes exhibit inherent trade-offs between performance, key sizes, and implementation complexity. To address this, we propose a novel hybrid cryptographic framework tailored for secure and efficient data transmission in future quantum-aware environments. The proposed system combines three algorithmic paradigms: a lattice-based encryption method for fast and lightweight data protection, a hash-based signature mechanism for authenticity, and a code-based key exchange method to ensure session confidentiality. This layered integration is designed to capitalize on each algorithm’s strengths while mitigating individual limitations. The system is implemented using modular components in a testbed simulating real-world deployments, and its performance is benchmarked across multiple metrics including encryption latency, signature generation time, key sizes, and throughput. Comparative results indicate that the hybrid approach outperforms monolithic schemes in critical areas such as execution time and cryptographic strength under quantum adversary models. The findings support the practicality of using multiple post-quantum primitives in tandem to build robust communication systems. This research contributes a realistic implementation and evaluation of post-quantum security models and highlights key directions for future research and standardization efforts as the global transition to quantum-safe infrastructure begins.
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.