Authentication is vital for the Internet of Things (IoT) applications involving sensitive data (e.g., medical and financial systems). Digital signatures offer scalable authentication with non-repudiation and public verifiability, which are necessary for auditing and dispute resolution in such IoT applications. However, digital signatures have been shown to be highly costly for low-end IoT devices, especially when embedded devices (e.g., medical implants) must operate without a battery replacement for a long time.
We propose an Energy-aware Signature for Embedded Medical devices (ESEM) that achieves near-optimal signer efficiency. ESEM signature generation does not require any costly operations (e.g., elliptic curve (EC) scalar multiplication/addition), but only a small constant-number of pseudo-random function calls, additions, and a single modular multiplication. ESEM has the smallest signature size among its EC-based counterparts with an identical private key size. We achieve this by eliminating the use of the ephemeral public key (i.e, commitment) in Schnorrtype signatures from the signing via a distributed construction at the verifier without interaction with the signer while permitting a constant-size public key. We proved that ESEM is secure (in random oracle model), and fully implemented it on an 8-bit AVR microcontroller that is commonly used in medical devices. Our experiments showed that ESEM achieves 8.4× higher energy efficiency over its closest counterpart while offering a smaller signature and code size. Hence, ESEM can be suitable for deployment on resource-limited embedded devices in IoT. We
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Compact Energy and Delay-Aware Authentication
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 counter-parts, 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-0ff for applications wherein the verffier is not memory-limited. We open-sourced our implementation of CEDA to enable its broad testing and adaptation.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1652389
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10080965
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- 2018 IEEE Conference on Communications and Network Security (CNS)
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 9
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Efficient authentication is vital for IoT applications with stringent minimum-delay requirements (e.g., energy delivery systems). This requirement becomes even more crucial when the IoT devices are battery-powered, like small aerial drones, and the efficiency of authentication directly translates to more operation time. Although some fast authentication techniques have been proposed, some of them might not fully meet the needs of the emerging delay-aware IoT. In this paper, we propose a new signature scheme called ARIS that pushes the limits of the existing digital signatures, wherein commodity hardware can verify 83,333 signatures per second. ARIS also enables the fastest signature generation along with the lowest energy consumption and end-to-end delay among its counterparts. These significant computational advantages come with a larger storage requirement, which is a favorable trade-off for some critical delay-aware applications. These desirable features are achieved by harnessing message encoding with cover-free families and a special elliptic curve based one-way function. We prove the security of ARIS under the hardness of the elliptic curve discrete logarithm problem in the random oracle model. We provide an open-sourced implementation of ARIS on commodity hardware and an 8-bit AVR microcontroller for public testing and verification.more » « less
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Digital signatures provide scalable authentication with non-repudiation and therefore are vital tools for the Internet of Things (IoT). IoT applications harbor vast quantities of low-end devices that are expected to operate for long periods with a risk of compromise. Hence, IoT needs post-quantum cryptography (PQC) that respects the resource limitations of low-end devices while offering compromise resiliency (e.g., forward security). However, as seen in NIST PQC efforts, quantum-safe signatures are extremely costly for low-end IoT. These costs become prohibitive when forward security is considered. We propose a highly lightweight post-quantum digital signature called HArdware-Supported Efficient Signature (HASES) that meets the stringent requirements of resource-limited signers (processor, memory, bandwidth) with forward security. HASES transforms a key-evolving one-time hash-based signature into a polynomial unbounded one by introducing a public key oracle via secure enclaves. The signer is non-interactive and only generates a few hashes per signature. Unlike existing hardware-supported alternatives, HASES does not require secure-hardware on the signer, which is infeasible for low-end IoT. HASES also does not assume non-colluding servers that permit scalable verification. We proved that HASES is secure and implemented it on the commodity hardware and the 8-bit AVR ATmega2560 microcontroller. Our experiments confirm that HASES is 271 and 34 faster than (forward-secure) XMSS and (plain) Dilithium. HASES is more than twice and magnitude more energy-efficient than (forward-secure) ANT and (plain) BLISS, respectively, on an 8-bit device. We open-source HASES for public testing and adaptation.more » « less
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null (Ed.)Audit logs play a crucial role in the security of computer systems and are targeted by the attackers due to their forensic value. Digital signatures are essential tools to ensure the authentication/integrity of logs with public verifiability and nonrepudiation. Especially, forward-secure and aggregate signatures (FAS) offer compromise-resiliency and append-only features such that an active attacker compromising a computer cannot tamper or selectively delete the logs collected before the breach. Despite their high-security, existing FAS schemes can only sign a small pre-defined number (K) of logs, and their key-size/computation overhead grows linearly with K. These limitations prevent a practical adoption of FAS schemes for digital forensics. In this paper, we created new signatures named COmpact and REsilient (CORE) schemes, which are (to the best of our knowledge) the first FAS that can sign (practically) unbounded number of messages with only a sub-linear growth in the keysize/computation overhead. Central to CORE is the creation of a novel K-time signature COREKBase that has a small-constant key generation overhead and public key size. We then develop CORE-MMM that harnesses COREK Base via forward-secure transformations. We showed that CORE-MMM significantly outperforms its alternatives for essential metrics. For instance, CORE-MMM provides more than two and one magnitudes faster key updates and smaller signatures, respectively, with smaller private keys. CORE-MMM also offers extra efficiency when the same messages are signed with evolving keys. We formally prove that CORE schemes are secure. Our analysis indicates that CORE schemes are ideal tools to enhance the trustworthiness of digital forensic applications.more » « less
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1109/CNS.2018.8433134
