Optimised elliptic curve digital signature on NIST compliant curves for authentication of MANET nodes

Abstract

Secure routing protocols for mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) use digital signatures for authentication which increases computational and communication overheads. Elliptical curve digital signature (ECDSA) uses much shorter keys resulting in smaller signatures, lower computational load, less memory and power requirements which are crucial to MANET nodes. The ECDSA has a characteristic that the signature generation is very fast but signature verification takes much longer time. Optimisation of point operations and scalar multiplication of points have been proposed for accelerating the signature generation and verification process. The proposed method has been software implemented by writing the code in Java using Big-integer class on a Linux platform for National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) compliant curves and has accelerated the signature verification process of ECDSA by approximately 27% over the sequential mixed Jacobian-Affine NAF scalar multiplication method of verification.