Heterogeneous Searchable Signcryption with Cryptographic Reverse Firewalls for a UAV Network

The rapid expansion of the Internet of Things (IoT) has accelerated the widespread adoption of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in various applications, including traffic monitoring. Nevertheless, storing UAV-collected data on the cloud introduces significant concerns regarding data confidentiality and security. Preserving the privacy of UAV data through encryption is feasible, yet this approach compromises the flexibility and ease of searching and retrieving the encrypted data. This paper introduces a novel heterogeneous searchable signcryption with cryptographic reverse firewalls (HSS-CRF) scheme to enhance the usability of searchable encrypted UAV data and ensure confidentiality. The HSS-CRF protocol establishes a secure communication channel from the sender's UAV site in a certificateless cryptography (CLC) environment to the authorized user utilizing a public key infrastructure (PKI) cryptosystem enhanced by CRF. Furthermore, the HSS-CRF scheme robustly counters threats from internal keyword guessing attacks (IKGAs), algorithm substitution attacks (ASAs), and keyword guessing attacks (KGA). Our analysis demonstrates that the scheme achieves a reduction in computational and communication overhead, making it suitable for resource-constrained UAV environments.