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

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’ m e t a d a t a 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.