Efficient attribute based sequential aggregate signature for wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are broadly applied in real scenarios, such as remote environmental monitoring and target tracking. However, data can be easily compromised by the adversary. Although attribute based signature (ABS) scheme is an important cryptographic primitive which provides a powerful way for users to control their privacy. When the number of users involved in the system becomes huge, the computational and storage overhead will grow large so that existing ABS schemes are insufficient for WSNs. In order to reduce the communication and computational cost of ABS to make it more suitable for WSNs, we propose an efficient attribute based sequential aggregate signature (EABSAS) scheme which allows a set of sensor nodes to sign on different messages, combine and compress them into a short signature which can greatly decrease the storage space. Through extensive analysis, we demonstrate that our EABSAS scheme can achieve the existential unforgeability to keep the data integrity, and significantly reduces computation and communication overhead than existing competing approaches.