Multi-receiver signcryption scheme with multiple key generation centers through public channel in edge computing

The emerging edge computing technology for the Internet of Things has been playing an important role in our daily life. It is promising to utilize a multi-receiver signcryption scheme to protect the transmission data when an edge device broadcasts its sensing data to many different end devices at a time. There are several things to consider when we design a signcryption scheme. First existing schemes need to maintain a secure channel to generate the user private key, which may increase economic costs. Second the system private key of those schemes is kept secret by a single key generation center (KGC), and the single point of failure of KGC may compromise the whole system. For this, we propose a multi-receiver multi-message signcryption scheme without the secure channel. Firstly the scheme allows KGC to send secrets through the public channel, which reduces maintenance costs. Secondly, to eliminate the single point of failure, the scheme utilizes multiple KGCs to manage the system private key, and updates the secret of each KGC periodically to resist advanced persistent threat attacks. We demonstrate that the proposed scheme can achieve expected security properties. Performance analysis shows that it is with shorter ciphertext length and higher efficiency.