Soft-Timeout Distributed Key Generation for Digital Signature based on Elliptic Curve D-log for Low-Power Devices

  • Authors:
  • Caimu Tang;Anthony T. Chronopoulos;Cauligi S. Raghavendra

  • Affiliations:
  • Univ. of Southern California;Univ. of Texas, San Antonio;Univ. of Southern California

  • Venue:
  • SECURECOMM '05 Proceedings of the First International Conference on Security and Privacy for Emerging Areas in Communications Networks
  • Year:
  • 2005

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Abstract

Group based transactions are becoming common via handhelds. Single key based systems may not be able to meet various security requirements. In this paper, we propose a threshold signature scheme based on Pedersen distributed key generation principle which is suitable for handheld devices and ad-hoc networks. Existing distributed key generation protocols use either cryptosystems based on the hardness of discrete logarithm over a finite field or integer factorization. Elliptic curve cryptosystems provide a promising alternative with efficiency which is suitable for low-power devices in terms of memory and processing overhead. In the proposed scheme, the public key from the key generation protocol follows a uniform distribution in the elliptic curve additive group, and the signature can be generated and verified efficiently. We evaluated the proposed key generation protocol and signature scheme using PARI/GP, and the key generation time takes a fraction of a second and the signature signing and verifying can be finished in a few milliseconds on the LINUX Intel PXA 255 processor.