Short Hash-Based Signatures for Wireless Sensor Networks

We present a hash-based signature scheme customized for wireless sensor networks. For message lengths required by instructions or queries from the base station or single measurements like the temperature, signature generation is 7 times faster and verification is 158 times faster than state-of-the-art implementations of ECDSA at the same security level. For message lengths sufficient for most sensor network applications, the signature generation time is comparable to ECDSA, while signature verification remains 20 times faster. Our scheme can be used to authenticate messages exchanged between sensor nodes, as well as for securing broadcast authentication. Our scheme minimizes the overhead introduced in the network by the signature verification done by each sensor before relaying the message.