Feasibility of Rainbow Signature for Broadcast Authentication in Sensor Networks

An authentication technique allows node to dynamically join the network, sense data and transmit authenticated data before going back to sleep. All the existing cryptosystems suffer from high computation or communication overhead, delayed authentication, severe energy diminution attacks and lack of scalability. The lack of efficiency, scalability or security can be attributed to the standard cryptographic primitives employed by the protocols. In this paper, Rainbow multivariate signature is proposed and explored as an alternative cryptographic mechanism for message authentication in Wireless sensor networks (WSN). The Rainbow class of signatures has been found to be suitable for resource scarce systems although the key size is large. The work determines the efficacy of this signature in a WSN environment by finding the computational and communication overheads due to the signature. Simulation shows that there is a significant increase in delay and queue size with a corresponding delay in the message throughput. However, the computational needs, the delay and throughput penalties are within tolerable limits even when the network density increases significantly. This shows that Rainbow signature can be used as an underlying cryptographic mechanism for efficient and scalable authentication protocols.