Heterogeneous Signcryption Scheme with Equality Test for Internet of Vehicles

By collecting and using vehicle dynamic data from sensors on vehicles, Internet of Vehicles (IoV) has greatly enhanced the convenience and intelligence of users’ transportation. However, the data transmission in IoV may compromise user privacy by revealing sensitive information such as location and identity. To address this problem, many signcryption schemes are proposed. Although most existing signcryption schemes can ensure user privacy, they fail to support communication among devices with heterogeneous cryptosystems and cannot enable ciphertext equality test. To overcome these limitations, we present a heterogenous signcryption scheme with equality test, named CP-HSCET. This scheme allows an IoV device in certificateless (CLC) environment to signcrypt messages and transport them to the management center in public key infrastructure (PKI)-based environment, hence achieving higher universality. Moreover, it supports equality test on ciphertexts, which allows a semi-honest third-party (usually a cloud server) to verify if the ciphertexts with different public key have the same plaintexts without unsigncrypting them, thereby enhancing the availability of our scheme. Finally, we compare the proposed scheme with the other four schemes. The result shows that the proposal is significantly superior to other schemes in terms of computation cost and total energy consumption. Therefore, our scheme is the most suitable for IoV environments, in which most of the devices have lower computational power.