An Identity-based Ring Signcryption Scheme: Evaluation for Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Networks consist of small, inexpensive, low-powered sensor nodes that communicate with each other. To achieve a low communication cost in a resource constrained network, a novel concept of signcryption has been applied for secure communication. Signcryption enables a user to perform a digital signature for providing authenticity and public key encryption for providing message confidentiality simultaneously in a single logical step with a lower cost than that of the sign-then-encrypt approach. Ring signcryption maintains the signer's privacy, which is lacking in normal signcryption schemes. Signcryption can provide confidentiality and authenticity without revealing the user's identity of the ring. This paper presents the security notions and an evaluation of an ID-based ring signcryption scheme for wireless sensor networks. The scheme has been proven to be better than the existing schemes. The proposed scheme was found to be secure against adaptive chosen ciphertext ring attacks (IND-IDRSC-CCA2) and secure against an existential forgery for adaptive chosen message attacks (EF-IDRSC-ACMA). The proposed scheme was found to be more efficient than scheme for Wireless Sensor Networks reported by Qi. et al. based on the running time and energy consumption.