Performance Comparison of Signcryption Schemes – A Step towards Designing Lightweight Cryptographic Mechanism

Abstract

Abstract-With the advancement of technology and use of heterogeneous devices in today's communication, computing has become ubiquitous involving devices that are low on computing power and therefore securing communication is necessary in this type of environment. The fundamental security attributes which any system must have includes confidentiality, integrity, authentication and nonrepudiation. Signcryption is a new way to achieve confidentiality and authentication simultaneously. Before the advent of signcryption the approach was to first encrypt and then to sign the message, but this scheme had more computational cost and communication overhead. Many signcryption schemes have been developed and implemented so far, but differ in security attributes they provide and computational cost they incur. The strength of these schemes depend upon the difficulty of solving any one problem namely IFP (Integer Factorization Problem), (DLP) Discrete Logarithmic Problem, ECDLP (Elliptic Curve Discrete Logarithmic Problem) or Bilinear Diffie Hellman Problem. This paper analyzes and compares the performance of various signcryption schemes in terms of security attributes and computational cost they take. This analysis provides a way to design Lightweight Cryptographic Mechanism suitable for low computing environments. The last section of the paper provides a generic approach for designing lightweight cryptographic mechanism. Keyword-Performance, Signcryption, Lightweight Cryptography I. INTRODUCTIONThe technique of Signcryption was coined by YuliangZheng [1] in 1997. Signcryption is relatively a new cryptographic system which combines encryption and authentication in only one logical step. Zheng claimed that signcryption incurs 58% less computational cost and 85% less overhead in comparision to the conventional signature-then-encryption approach. Since the inception of signcryption many signcryption schemes have been given by the authors throughout the years offering different security attributes while having certain advantages and limitations. Also these signcryption schemes are based on DLP (Discrete Logarithmic Problem), ECDLP (Elliptic Curve Discrete Logarithmic Problem) or BDHP (Bilinear Diffie Hellman Problem) [25]. The mechanism of signcryption has been explained in the upcoming section of the paper.

Towards Light Weight CryptographySchemes for Resource ConstraintDevices in IoT

“…ECC and HECC combined with signcryption had shown the remarkable results in computational cost and energy consumption. There is a generalized signcryption algorithm for low computing devices which is proposed in [56]. This general approach which uses…”