Paper 2018/028

Compact Energy and Delay-Aware Authentication

Muslum Ozgur Ozmen, Rouzbeh Behnia, and Attila A. Yavuz

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.