A Resource-Friendly Certificateless Proxy Signcryption Scheme for Drones in Networks beyond 5G

• Published in: Drones (Basel) Vol. 7; no. 5; p. 321
• Main Authors: Khan, Muhammad Asghar, Alhakami, Hosam, Ullah, Insaf, Alhakami, Wajdi, Mohsan, Syed Agha Hassnain, Tariq, Usman, Innab, Nisreen
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Basel MDPI AG 01.05.2023
• Subjects: Algorithms; Communication; Confidentiality; Cryptography; Curves; Data security; Digital signatures; Drone aircraft; Drones; Forgery; Global positioning systems; GPS; Ground stations; hyperelliptic curve cryptography; Literature reviews; Methods; Mobile communication systems; Privacy; proxy signcryption; Public Key Infrastructure; random oracle model; Satellites; Security; Wireless communication systems; Pakistan
• ISSN: 2504-446X; 2504-446X
• DOI: 10.3390/drones7050321

Security and privacy issues were long a subject of concern with drones from the past few years. This is due to the lack of security and privacy considerations in the design of the drone, which includes unsecured wireless channels and insufficient computing capability to perform complex cryptographic algorithms. Owing to the extensive real-time applications of drones and the ubiquitous wireless connection of beyond 5G (B5G) networks, efficient security measures are required to prevent unauthorized access to sensitive data. In this article, we proposed a resource-friendly proxy signcryption scheme in certificateless settings. The proposed scheme was based on elliptic curve cryptography (ECC), which has a reduced key size, i.e., 80 bits, and is, therefore, suitable for drones. Using the random oracle model (ROM), the security analysis of the proposed scheme was performed and shown to be secure against well-known attacks. The performance analysis of the proposed scheme was also compared to relevant existing schemes in terms of computation and communication costs. The findings validate the practicability of the proposed scheme.