An Efficient Group Signature Scheme in Ferry-Based Delay-Tolerant Networks

In Delay-Tolerant Networks (DTNs), security and efficiency are paramount concerns for data transmission. To enhance efficiency, message ferries were introduced to DTN, which commonly builds up a new class of DTN, i.e., the Ferry-based DTN (FDTN). However, although several message ferry-based approaches were proposed to improve the message efficiency, none of them was able to handle the severe security challenges caused by Ferries. In this paper, we for the first time analyze the security challenges in FDTN, and further propose EGS, an efficient group signature scheme to meet the security requirements of FDTN. EGS is a novel hybrid group signature scheme. In the node-node communication, source nodes sign messages using an improved SoK scheme, while in the node-ferry-node communication paradigm, EGS exploits ferry node to re-sign messages using the RSA signature scheme. Furthermore, EGS integrates a light-weight scheme to verify the ferry's signature, which brings very little computational cost. Our extensive analysis shows that our EGS is very efficient and suitable for FDTN.