Real-Time Digital Signatures for Time-Critical Networks

The secure and efficient operation of time-critical networks, such as vehicular networks, smart-grid, and other smart-infrastructures, is of primary importance in today’s society. It is crucial to minimize the impact of security mechanisms over such networks so that the safe and reliable operations of time-critical systems are not being interfered. For instance, if the delay introduced by the crypto operations negatively affects the time available for braking a car before a collision, the car may not be able to safely stop in time. In particular, as a primary authentication mechanism, existing digital signatures introduce a significant computation and communication overhead, and therefore are unable to fully meet the real-time processing requirements of such time-critical networks. In this paper, we introduce a new suite of real-time digital signatures referred to as <italic>Structure-free and Compact Real-time Authentication</italic> (<inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">${SCRA}$ </tex-math></inline-formula>), supported by hardware acceleration, to provide delay-aware authentication in time-critical networks. <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">${SCRA}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> is a novel signature framework that can transform any secure aggregate signature into a signer efficient signature. We instantiate <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">${SCRA}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> framework with condensed-RSA, BGLS, and NTRU signatures. Our analytical and experimental evaluation validates the significant performance advantages of <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">${SCRA}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> schemes over their base signatures and the state-of-the-art schemes. Moreover, we push the performance of <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">${SCRA}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> schemes to the edge via highly optimized implementations on vehicular capable system-on-chip as well as server-grade general purpose graphics processing units. We prove that <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">${SCRA}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> is secure (in random oracle model) and show that <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">${SCRA}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> can offer an ideal alternative for authentication in time-critical applications.