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 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
Current cellular authentication mechanisms rely primarily on SIM-based Authentication and Key Agreement (AKA), which have scaled successfully worldwide but face challenges as the Internet of Things (IoT) grows to billions of devices. SIM provisioning and lifecycle management become increasingly costly, while reliance on long-term symmetric keys limits revocation flexibility and cross-operator support. To address these issues, we propose a SIM-less, certificate-based authentication framework that integrates Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) with post-quantum cryptography (PQC). Specifically, the framework employs Kyber for key encapsulation and Dilithium for digital signatures, providing quantum-resistant protection for future networks. A key challenge is the computational overhead of PQC on constrained IoT devices; we address this by offloading cryptographic operations to trusted edge servers, whose integrity is validated using attestation mechanisms such as Trusted Platform Modules (TPMs) or secure enclaves. We implement and evaluate the framework in a simulated FutureG environment, comparing IoT-only execution against edge-assisted configurations. Results show that edge offloading reduces TLS handshake latency by up to 96% while maintaining minimal resource usage on devices. These findings demonstrate that PQC-enabled PKI, combined with edge-assisted execution, offers a scalable and practical complement to SIM/AKA for secure and quantum-resilient authentication in FutureG IoT deployments.
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.