Short Online/Off-line Signature Scheme for Wireless Sensor Networks

1. Introduction

Recently Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have brought forth a wide range of attention to the research community. One of the significant obstacles is the deployment of the smart sensor node where it is encountered by many malicious attackers. Therefore, it's a very great challenge to the research community to achieve integrity of the sensitive information. Also, while transmitting the information from one node to another based on some local decision process, the node should not deny that, has not sent the information later on i.e. non-repudiation. In order to achieve the security goals, integrity and non-repudiation an efficient signature scheme is to deploy (J.Kar, 2012). The smart sensors are very tiny having limited powers designed with single or multiple sensors. These are low-cost as compared to the conventional sensors. The ability of the sensor nodes is they can measure, sense and collect information from the environments.

Wireless sensor network (WSN) is defined as a compact micro sensor that has wireless commutation ability. The improvements of the wireless commutation technologies have increased the development of wireless sensor network now they can use lower power and they are small in size. Generally, the deployment of WSN system is in a hostile environment where the probabilities of occurring threats are more. It is a challenge to the research community to protect the information as well as established authentication and integrity in the data. Due to various inherent restrictions like limited storage, low powers, short communications overhead, many cryptographic protocols include key establishment, digital signature, mutual authentication between two adjacent nodes have been proposed by different authors. However, these protocols have lack of security proof and have vulnerabilities. In order to achieve integrity and non-repudiation, we propose an Online/Off-line signature scheme with provable security. Generation of signature is performed in two phases online and off-line. Further, to reduce the communications overhead, we develop a short signature scheme. All heavy computations are performed in off line phase where it does not depend upon the message to be signed. Other light computations are performed in online, phase, so that overall computational cost is very less. Hence it is suited to implement on WSN systems. Wireless sensor networks comprise of tiny nodes known as motes that monitor environmental as well as physical conditions such as temperature, sound, vibration etc. Data are stored and processed in the motes. After processing, it communicates through wireless links (J.Kar, 2014; M.Bellare & P.Rogaway, 1996) . WSN systems comprise a base station communicates with a number of wireless sensors present nearby by use of a radio link. Once the data is composed by some transitional node, it is then compressed by ZIP algorithm, and directly communicated to the gateway. If the communication link is not direct, it uses other sensor nodes to pass data to the gateway. After receiving the data at the base station then it is accessible to the system by the connection of gateway (J.Kar, 2014).