Comments on “A Certificateless Aggregated Signcryption Scheme for Cloud-Fog Centric Industry 4.0”

Recently, the fusion of industrial processes and communication technologies has emerged as Industry 4.0. In this emergence, smart devices such as sensors and mobile phones and machines have become data prosumers (i.e., producer and consumer both simultaneously). The exchange of data between these prosumers takes place using the public Internet. In this system, generally, producers send colossal data to consumers via a cloud server. So that, the consumer can easily access the required data. As prosumers are generally resource-constrained smart devices (like sensors, actuators, etc.), therefore, the processing and analysis of such massive data are done by the cloud servers. Thus, the receiver device gets processed data. However, sometimes the response is delayed. To overcome the latency, cloud computing and fog computing have been merged together so that the time-bound data may be processed on the fog node, as it is near to prosumers. However, due to public connection, the security and privacy issues like data leakage/modification or illegal admittance are major problems. To banish such issues, a certificateless aggregated signcryption scheme has been proposed by Dohare et al. (published in IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics, doi: 10.1109/TII.2022.3142306). However, after a detailed analysis, we found various flaws in their scheme. In this paper, we present the cryptanalysis of the Dohare et al.’s scheme. To show the cryptanalysis effectively, we present a detailed discussion by pondering the mathematical and theoretical concepts.