Practical RSA signature scheme based on periodical rekeying for wireless sensor networks

Broadcast is an efficient communication channel on wireless sensor networks. Through authentic broadcast, deployed sensors can perform legitimate actions issued by a base station. According to previous literature, a complete solution for authentic broadcast is digital signature based on asymmetric cryptography. However, asymmetric cryptography utilizes expensive operations, which result in computational bottlenecks. Among these cryptosystems, Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) seems to be the most efficient and the most popular choice. Unfortunately, signature verification in ECC is not efficient enough. In this article, we propose an authentic broadcast scheme based on RSA. Unlike conventional approaches, the proposed scheme adopts short moduli to enhance performance. Meanwhile, the weakness of short moduli can be fixed with rekeying strategies. To minimize the rekeying overhead, a Multi-Modulus RSA generation algorithm, which can reduce communication overhead by 50%, is proposed. We implemented the proposed scheme on MICAz. On 512-bit moduli, each verification spends at most 0.077 seconds, which is highly competitive with other public-key cryptosystems.