Cryptanalysis of an online/offline certificateless signature scheme for internet of health things

Abstract

Recently, Khan et al. [An online-offline certificateless signature scheme for internet of health things,” Journal of Healthcare Engineering, vol. 2020] pre-sented a new certificateless offline/online signature scheme for Internet of Health Things (IoHT) to fulfill the authenticity requirements of the resource-constrained environment of (IoHT) devices. The authors claimed that the newly proposed scheme is formally secured against Type-I adversary under the Random Oracle Model (ROM). Unfortunately, their scheme is insecure against adaptive chosen message attacks. It is demonstrated that an adversary can forge a valid signature on a message by replacing the public key. Furthermore, we performed a compara-tive analysis of the selective parameters including computation time, communication overhead, security, and formal proof by employing Evaluation based on Distance from Average Solution (EDAS). The analysis shows that the designed scheme of Khan et al. doesn’t have any sort of advantage over the previous schemes. Though, the authors utilized a lightweight hyperelliptic curve cryptosys-tem with a smaller key size of 80-bits. Finally, we give some suggestions on the construction of a concrete security scheme under ROM.