Crowdsensing utilizes the wisdom of crowd by sensing the information through different types of smart devices such as a smartphone, tablet, and sensors to serve the problem of common interests. It can be achieved by the concept of Internet of Things (IoT), which considers a large set of smart sensing interconnected devices. However, these devices are resource constrained in terms of storage, infrastructure, and computation power, and therefore, cloud technology is required. In order to minimize the storage overhead, only authentic extracted information from crowdsourcing is desirable to store in the cloud space. A number of signature‐based authentication schemes have been designed using either bilinear pairing or random oracle model (ROM) for the IoT devices. However, due to the high computational pairing cost and improper ROM implementation, schemes are found to be inefficient and vulnerable under the chosen‐message and chosen‐ID attack. To reduce the computational cost, we propose a pairing‐free quadratic residue–based signature scheme that authenticates IoT devices and cloud centric data. In addition, the proposed signature does not consider ROM, and it is secure in the standard model based on the proposed modified interactive quadratic residuosity assumption. Performance evaluation and comparisons ensure that our scheme is more efficient than earlier related schemes.