CL-ME: Efficient Certificateless Matchmaking Encryption for Internet of Things

The Internet of Things (IoT) is gradually stepping out of its infancy into maturity. Its widespread applications cover from tiny wearable devices to large industrial systems. Although many security solutions have been introduced to address data security and privacy problems caused by the unique characteristics of IoT, how to simultaneously achieve data confidentiality, protect the privacy of access control policy, and provide reasonable data source identification has been a challenging problem. Moreover, lacking one of the above properties may result in serious issues (e.g., leakage information and forging identity), and the situation grows steadily worse with the expansion of “things” scale. To address the above issues, we propose a new cryptographic primitive named certificateless matchmaking encryption (CL-ME), which inherits the security properties of certificateless cryptosystem and matchmaking encryption. Meanwhile, we also present two effective concrete constructions with formal security proofs based on the standard hard assumptions. The basic construction is the first instance of CL-ME based on bilinear pairing, and the enhanced construction is a pairing-free lightweight solution. Finally, we implement our proposed schemes using popular cryptography library and compare their performance with existing works. Theoretical analysis and experimental evaluations demonstrate that our proposed schemes are more suitable for IoT environment.