A Security-Enhanced Certificateless Designated Verifier Aggregate Signature Scheme for HWMSNs in the YOSO Model

Due to the advent of healthcare wireless medical sensor networks (HWMSNs) technology, the traditional model of medical treatment has been transformed. In HWMSNs environments, sensor nodes (e.g., wearable devices) collect medical data from patients and transmit them to doctors for diagnosis. Several certificateless aggregate signature (CLAS) schemes have been put forward to guarantee secure transmission of medical data and privacy of patients in HWMSNs. However, the utilization of a centralized key generation center (KGC) implies elevated risk of insecurity and privacy disclosure. Practical and destructive coalition attacks resulting from the collusion of an insider signer with a malicious KGC are difficult to resist. Therefore, a security-enhanced certificateless designated verifier anonymous aggregate signature (CL-DVAAS) scheme is devised to solve these problems. As introduced in the you only speak once (YOSO) model, an ever-changing, unpredictable committee replaces the role of the KGC for system initialization and key distribution. The serverless computing paradigm empowers the proposed scheme with excellent attack prevention and privacy protection capabilities. The proposed scheme is provably secure against various types of attacks in the random oracle model. Moreover, the performance evaluation and comparison illustrate that our scheme outperforms the state-of-the-art solutions.

I. Introduction

Nowadays, with the rapid development of wireless body area networks (WBANs), healthcare wireless medical sensor networks (HWMSNs) have gained great popularity. In HWMSNs environments, medical sensor nodes attached to patients’ bodies monitor physical parameters, e.g., heart rate, body temperature, etc. [1], [2]. These medical data can be sent to doctors for real-time feedback. Simultaneously, there are also plenty of security and privacy issues in HWMSNs. Since medical data is transmitted through public channels, adversaries can easily eavesdrop on, tamper with, and forge the medical data [3]. Once this data is modified by adversaries, patients’ lives will be threatened [4]. Furthermore, if patients’ medical data is divulged, medical institutions may face serious privacy problems [2], [5]. Consequently, how to achieve secure communication and privacy preservation has become an important research topic in HWMSNs.