Efficient Protocols for Signing Routing Messages

Author(s): Kan Zhang

Download: Paper (PDF)

Date: 11 Mar 1998

Document Type: Presentations

Additional Documents: Slides

Associated Event: NDSS Symposium 1998

Abstract:

In this work, we aim to reduce the computational costs of using public-key digital signatures in securing routing protocols. Two protocols (COSP and IOSP) using one-time digital signatures are introduced to provide the functionality of public-key digital signatures. Our protocols are intended to be used in place of public-key digital signatures for sign- ing all kinds of message exchanges among routers. We ob- tained more than ten-fold increase in speed compared with public-key signatures. Our protocols overcome the short- comings identified in previous works, such as timing con- straints, limited applications and high storage and compu- tational costs for volatile environments [12].
Since our protocols are non-interactive, they provide full functionality of a true signature. However, our protocols are not intended for replacing public-key infrastructures com- pletely. Instead, public-key infrastructures are used to set up COSP and IOSP. As a general approach, our protocols can be used with public-key cryptosystems for efficient mes- sage signing in much the same way as secret-key cryptosys- tems are used in conjunction with public-key systems for efficient data encryption.