SLIM: A secure and lightweight multi-authority attribute-based signcryption scheme for IoT

Although attribute-based signcryption (ABSC) offers a promising technology to ensure the security of IoT data sharing, it faces a two-fold challenge in practical implementation, namely, the linearly increasing computation and communication costs and the heavy load of single authority based key management. To this end, we propose a Secure and Lightweight Multi-authority ABSC scheme called SLIM in this paper. The signcryption and de-signcryption costs of devices are reduced to a small constant by offloading most of the computation to the edge server. To minimize communication and storage costs, a short and constant-size ciphertext is designed. Moreover, we adopt a hierarchical multi-authority architecture, setting up multiple attribute authorities that manage keys independently to prevent the bottleneck. Rigorous security analysis proves that the SLIM scheme can resist adaptive chosen ciphertext attacks and adaptive chosen message attacks under the standard model. Simulation experiments demonstrate the correctness of our theoretical derivations and the cost reduction of the SLIM scheme in computation, communication and storage