Efficient Protocols for Signing Routing Messages

In this work, we aim to reduce the computational costs of using public-key digital signatures in securing routing protocols. Two protocols (COSP and IOSP) using one-time digital signatures are introduced to provide the functionality of public-key digital signatures. Our protocols are intended to be used in place of public-key digital signatures for signing all kinds of message exchanges among routers. We obtained more than ten-fold increase in speed compared with public-key signatures. Our protocols overcome the shortcomings identified in previous works, such as timing constraints, limited applications and high storage and computational costs for volatile environments [12]. Since our protocols are non-interactive, they provide full functionality of a true signature. However, our protocols are not intended for replacing public-key infrastructures completely. Instead, public-key infrastructures are used to set up COSP and IOSP. As a general approach, our protocols can be used with public-key cryptosystems for efficient message signing in much the same way as secret-key cryptosystems are used in conjunction with public-key systems for efficient data encryption.