Anonymous Communication via Anonymous Identity-Based Encryption and Its Application in IoT

Abstract

Under the environment of the big data, the correlation between the data makes people have a greater demand for privacy. Moreover, the world has become more diversified and democratic than ever before. Freedom of speech is considered to be very important; thus, anonymity is also a very important security demand. The research of our paper proposes a scheme which can ensure both the privacy and the anonymity of a communication system, that is, the protection of message privacy while ensuring the users' anonymity. It is based on anonymous identity-based encryption (IBE), by which the users' metadata are protected. We implement our scheme in Java with Java pairing-based cryptography library (JPBC); the experiment shows that our scheme has significant advantage in efficiency compared with other anonymous communication system. Internet-of-Things (IoT) involves many devices, and privacy of devices is very significant. Anonymous communication system provides a secure environment without leaking metadata, which has many application scenarios in IoT.