ESS‐IBAA: Efficient, short, and secure ID‐based authentication algorithm for wireless sensor network

Abstract

SummaryDesigning an efficient, short, and secure authentication algorithm for resource‐constrained sensor nodes of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) is a challenging task. Authentication in WSNs is mainly performed by the digital signature algorithm. In this paper, we propose an efficient, short, and secure pairing computation‐free ID‐based authentication algorithm (signature scheme) ESS‐IBAA for WSNs which completely follows the rule of identity‐based cryptosystem. Identity‐based schemes, unlike traditional public‐key infrastructure (PKI)‐based schemes, remove the need for public‐key certificates for public‐key validation. It also removes extra costs associated with the public‐key certificate and traffic management. Further, due to the requirement of low power and fast authentication, bilinear pairing computation‐free identity‐based signature schemes are applicable in WSNs. Keeping this in mind, ESS‐IBAA scheme is proposed, which is pairing computation free and uses a general cryptographic hash function in the place of a costly map‐to‐point hash function. The proposed scheme ESS‐IBAA is secure against existential forgery on adaptive chosen message and ID attack in the random oracle model under the hardness of the elliptic curve discrete logarithm problem (ECDLP). Moreover, comparative performance analysis shows that the proposed scheme ESS‐IBAA is much more efficient in both communication cost and computation cost from the existing related schemes.