Practical Secure Communication for Integrating Wireless Sensor Networks Into the Internet of Things

If a wireless sensor network (WSN) is integrated into the Internet as a part of the Internet of things (IoT), there will appear new security challenges, such as setup of a secure channel between a sensor node and an Internet host. In this paper, we propose a heterogeneous online and offline signcryption scheme to secure communication between a sensor node and an Internet host. We prove that this scheme is indistinguishable against adaptive chosen ciphertext attacks under the bilinear Diffie-Hellman inversion problem and existential unforgeability against adaptive chosen messages attacks under the q-strong Diffie-Hellman problem in the random oracle model. Our scheme has the following advantages. First, it achieves confidentiality, integrity, authentication, and non-repudiation in a logical single step. Second, it allows a sensor node in an identity-based cryptography to send a message to an Internet host in a public key infrastructure. Third, it splits the signcryption into two phases: i) offline phase; and ii) online phase. In the offline phase, most heavy computations are done without the knowledge of a message. In the online phase, only light computations are done when a message is available. Our scheme is very suitable to provide security solution for integrating WSN into the IoT.