Abstract
The need for Lightweight cryptography is on the rise as transition has been made from wired to wireless network. Wireless systems inherently are insecure and resource (power) constrained, to deal with these constraints, many techniques for symmetric and asymmetric cryptography are defined. One such important developement is Signcryption to achieve message confidentiality, integrity, sender and message authentication, non repudiation, forward secrecy as well as unforgeability, and public verifiability. Since Signcryption combines the signature and encryption therefore the cost is very less in comparison to those schemes based on the signature then encryption. Many signcryption schemes have been proposed based on El-Gamal, RSA and ECC till today. This paper highlights limitations of the existing ECC based schemes using signcryption. These limitations include some missing security aspects as well as high computation power requirement, more communication overhead incurred and large memory requirements. Further it proposes an efficient lightweight signcryption scheme based on HECC which fulfills all the security requirements. The scheme reduced significant amounts of computation, communication costs and message size as compared to existing signcryption schemes making it the good candidate for environments suffer from the resource limitation problems.