Performance of two one-time signature schemes in space/time constrained environments
ISWPC'10 Proceedings of the 5th IEEE international conference on Wireless pervasive computing
The ForwardDiffsig scheme for multicast authentication
IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (TON)
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With the advance of technology, Public Key Cryptography (PKC) will be used - sooner or later - in wireless and sensor applications not only to provide security services like authentication, integrity and non-repudiation on the data provided, but also to achieve a perfect connectivity and a perfect resilience in large-scale wireless and sensor networks. One of the weak points of PKC is its performance, and because of this reason several authentication approaches use efficient structures, like the Merkle Hash Trees (MHT), which are combined with the traditional PKC operations to produce secure but also time-efficient authentication solutions.This paper investigates the performance of a popular algorithm for traversal of large MHTs authored by M. Szydlo and demonstrates that several other parameters (not just the CPU processor) need to be taken into consideration when designing applications that use MHTs, like the signing time, the hash time, the depth of the MHT and the space available, since they impact directly on the performance of the overall application. Moreover, we construct two models to simulate the behaviour of a device that uses Szydlo's algorithm to authenticate large amounts of data, like a real-time data flow. We chose Szydlo's algorithm because it saves more space than other MHT traversal algorithms and we assumed that in our case study the space (and not necessarily the CPU power) is the resource to be considered critical.