An efficient and practical certificateless signcryption scheme for wireless body area networks

Wireless body area networks (WBANs) is a critical research focus at present, providing a reliable and smart healthcare system to monitor the physical condition of the patient. Only the authorized user can access the WBANs since the collected data is very personal and sensitive. In this paper, we present a certificateless signcryption scheme based on RSA and then design an efficient data access control scheme for WBANs using the proposed signcryption scheme. The system does not have the certificate management and the key escrow problems. The most striking one is that it is based only on the widely used RSA cryptosystem without the bilinear pairing, which is advantageous to its realization in industry. The analysis shows that the scheme is secure in the random oracle model and simultaneously satisfies confidentiality, authentication, integrity, non-repudiation, and public ciphertext verification. Besides, it has reasonable computational and communication costs. To our knowledge, this is the first certificateless signcryption scheme based on RSA to date.