O3HSC: Outsourced Online/Offline Hybrid Signcryption for Wireless Body Area Networks

Wireless body area networks (WBAN) enable ubiquitous monitoring of patients, which can change the future of healthcare services overwhelmingly. As the collected data of patients usually contain sensitive information, how to collect, transfer, store and share data securely and properly has become a concerning issue. Attribute-based encryption (ABE) can achieve data confidentiality and fine-grained access control simultaneously. Identity-based ring signature (IBRS) allows patients to prove their identity without leaking any extra (private) information. However, the heavy computational burden of ABE and IBRS is intolerable for most power-limited mobile devices, which account for a large proportion of WBAN devices. This paper combines the attribute-based online/offline encryption (ABOOE) and IBRS to achieve an outsourced online/offline hybrid signcryption (O-3 HSC) scheme. As far as we know, this scheme is the first signcryption scheme that adopts IBRS and satisfies online/offline signcryption simultaneously. O-3 HSC divides the key generation and signcryption into offline and online phases to increase the throughput of the central authority and save the power resources of mobile devices, respectively. Besides, outsourced decryption and public signature verification are also realized. O-3 HSC achieves security under CCA and CMIA, and the performance analysis shows that O-3 HSC is a lightweight and applicable scheme for WBAN.