Compact Energy and Delay-Aware Authentication

Abstract

Authentication and integrity are fundamental security services that are critical for any viable system. However, some of the emerging systems (e.g., smart grids, aerial drones) are delay-sensitive, and therefore their safe and reliable operation requires delay-aware authentication mechanisms. Unfortunately, the current state-of-the-art authentication mechanisms either incur heavy computations or lack scalability for such large and distributed systems. Hence, there is a crucial need for digital signature schemes that can satisfy the requirements of delay-aware applications. In this paper, we propose a new digital signature scheme that we refer to as Compact Energy and Delay-aware Authentication (CEDA). In CEDA, signature generation and verification only require a small-constant number of multiplications and Pseudo Random Function (PRF) calls. Therefore, it achieves the lowest end-to-end delay among its counterparts. Our implementation results on an ARM processor and commodity hardware show that CEDA has the most efficient signature generation on both platforms, while offering a fast signature verification. Among its delay-aware counterparts, CEDA has a smaller private key with a constant-size signature. All these advantages are achieved with the cost of a larger public key. This is a highly favorable trade-off for applications wherein the verifier is not memory-limited. We open-sourced our implementation of CEDA to enable its broad testing and adaptation