Self-sustaining, efficient and forward-secure cryptographic constructions for Unattended Wireless Sensor Networks

In this paper, we propose a new class of cryptographic schemes, referred to as Hash-BasedSequentialAggregate andForwardSecureSignature (HaSAFSS), which allows a signer to sequentially generate a compact, fixed-size, and publicly verifiable signature efficiently. We develop three HaSAFSS schemes, Symmetric HaSAFSS (Sym-HaSAFSS), Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) based HaSAFSS (ECC-HaSAFSS) and self-SUstaining HaSAFSS (SU-HaSAFSS). These schemes integrate the efficiency of MAC-based aggregate signatures and the public verifiability of Public Key Cryptography (PKC)-based signatures by preserving forward security via Timed-Release Encryption (TRE). We demonstrate that our schemes are secure and also significantly more efficient than previous approaches.