An Efficient Online/Offline Heterogeneous Signcryption Scheme with Keyword Search for IoVs

The rapid development of Internet-of-Vehicle (IoV) technologies has led to the current trend that vehicles on the road are increasingly Internet-connected, be they for assisting navigation, safety monitoring, traffic management or infotainment. With the explosive growth in the number of connected vehicles, massive amount of data is collected from vehicles, transmitted, stored and processed in the cloud to provide AI-assisted/autonomous functions. From the perspective of safety and security, the timely transmission and processing of data are critical problems that need to be addressed rigorously. Typically, advanced data management services via the cloud server are developed for supporting IoV. However, the potential risk of data leakage in the cloud has caused serious privacy concerns which could even result in breaches in privacy regulations. To address these issues, we propose an online/offline heterogeneous signcryption with keyword search scheme (OOHSC-KW). Firstly, the incorporation of heterogeneous signcryption keyword search guarantees the security of data. The presented protocol executes the keyword retrieval from heterogeneous devices, which increases the availability of ciphertext and reduces the search overhead. Secondly, the proposed scheme divides signcryption phase into two stages, and the overall signcryption overhead is reduced. Finally, our scheme has the smallest computational overhead during the key generation step, when the number of messages is greater than 25, our construction also has a lower signcryption overhead compared to the listed works.