Protecting HWSNs from Super Adversaries with Robust Certificateless Signcryption

Parichehr Dadkhah; Parvin Rastegari; Mohammad Dakhilalian; Phil Yeoh; Mingzhong Wang; Shahrzad Saremi; Rania Shibl; Yassine Himeur; Wathiq Mansoor

doi:10.3390/telecom7020037

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Protecting HWSNs from Super Adversaries with Robust Certificateless Signcryption

Journal article

Open access

Peer reviewed

Protecting HWSNs from Super Adversaries with Robust Certificateless Signcryption

Parichehr Dadkhah, Parvin Rastegari, Mohammad Dakhilalian, Phil Yeoh, Mingzhong Wang, Shahrzad Saremi, Rania Shibl, Yassine Himeur and Wathiq Mansoor

Telecom, Vol.7(2), pp.1-25

2026

DOI: https://doi.org/10.3390/telecom7020037

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Abstract

certificateless

signature

signcryption

HWSN

anonymity

standard model

Healthcare Wireless Sensor Networks (HWSNs) have attracted significant attention due to their vital role in diseases’ diagnosis, monitoring, and treatment. By continuously collecting patients’ physiological data and enabling remote medical services, these networks can greatly improve the quality of healthcare. However, the inadequate handling of security and privacy issues poses serious risks to patients. In this context, signcryption schemes are essential cryptographic primitives that simultaneously provide authentication, confidentiality, and data integrity with a low overhead. Recently, Deng et al. proposed a certificateless signcryption (CL-SC) scheme for HWSNs and proved its security in the standard model. In this paper, we demonstrate that their scheme is insecure under an enhanced adversarial model, where a super Type II adversary, which is a malicious key generation center, can replace the system’s master public key using the master secret key under its control, and subsequently forge valid signcryptions on arbitrary messages on behalf of a sensor node. To address this vulnerability, we propose an enhanced CL-SC scheme based on elliptic curve cryptography (ECC). Under the hardness assumptions of the Elliptic Curve Decisional Diffie–Hellman Problem (ECDDHP) and the Computation Attack Algorithm (CAA), the proposed scheme achieves confidentiality and existential unforgeability against both super Type I and super Type II adversaries in the standard model. Performance analysis further shows that our scheme is efficient and well suited for resource-constrained HWSN environments.

Details

Title: Protecting HWSNs from Super Adversaries with Robust Certificateless Signcryption
Authors: Parichehr Dadkhah - Isfahan University of Technology
Parvin Rastegari - Isfahan University of Technology
Mohammad Dakhilalian - Isfahan University of Technology
Phil Yeoh - University of the Sunshine Coast
Mingzhong Wang - University of the Sunshine Coast
Shahrzad Saremi - University of the Sunshine Coast
Rania Shibl (Corresponding Author) - University of the Sunshine Coast
Yassine Himeur - University of Dubai
Wathiq Mansoor - American University of Iraq Baghdad
Publication details: Telecom, Vol.7(2), pp.1-25
Publisher: MDPI AG
Date published: 2026
DOI: 10.3390/telecom7020037
ISSN: 2673-4001
Copyright note: © 2026 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license.
Data Availability: The original contributions presented in this study are included in the article. Further inquiries can be directed to the corresponding author.
Organisation Unit: Healthy Ageing Research Cluster; School of Science, Technology and Engineering
Language: English
Record Identifier: 991222725102621
Output Type: Journal article

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