Efficient Protocols for Signing Routing Messages.
Kan Zhang · 1998
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 signing all kinds of message exchanges among routers. We obtained more than ten-fold increase in speed compared with public-key signatures. Our protocols overcome the shortcomings identified in previous works, such as timing constraints, limited applications and high storage and computational 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 completely. 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 message signing in much the same way that secret key cryptosystems are used in conjunction with public key systems for efficient data encryption.