Blockchain-Assisted Puncturable Signcryption for Cloud and Fog-Hosted Industrial Cyber-Physical Systems

The widespread adoption of emerging technologies, such as interconnected sensors and advanced automation systems, has led to rapid advancements in smart industrial environments. While industrial cyber-physical systems (ICPSs) bring efficiency and innovation to industrial processes, the security risks are also of great concern. The existing work provides many methods for data security and authentication for ICPSs. However, since the authentication status of ICPSs is changeable, the up-to-date methods can hardly meet the requirements for rapid authentication and secure data transmission. What’s more, large-scale message revocation incurs significant communication and computational costs. This paper proposes a blockchain-assisted identity-based puncturable signcryption (BC-IBPSC) scheme for cloud and fog-hosted ICPSs. First, based on the concepts of puncturable encryption and signature, a novel identity-based puncturable signcryption method is presented to achieve efficient verifiable data encryption. Second, the blockchain is utilized to record all valid and punctured messages, to achieve evidence storage and traceability. The results of the analysis indicate that the scheme ensures security and operates efficiently. In addition, experiments show that the size of the signcrypted files does not affect the value of Gas consumption on the blockchain when uploading proofs.