McCLS: Certificateless signature scheme for emergency mobile wireless cyber-physical systems

Abstract

Mobile Ad Hoc Network is a self-configurable and self-organizing wireless network of mobile devices without fixed infrastructure support, which makes it a good candidate as underlying communication network for the Cyber-Physical Systems in emergency conditions such as earthquake, flood, and battlefields. In these scenarios, efficient communication schemes with security support are especially desired. Two cryptography approaches, the public key cryptography and the identity-based cryptography, face the costly and complex key management problem and the "key escrow" problem in the real-life deployment. Recently, the certificateless public key cryptography (CL-PKC) was introduced to address these problems in previous approaches. However, the efficiency of the schemes based on CL-PKC is not high and can be improved further. In this paper, we present an improved certificateless signature scheme (McCLS) based on bilinear pairings. First, we theoretically compare the efficiency of McCLS with that of existing certificateless signature schemes (CLS). Second, an empirical study is conducted to compare the traditional AODV with the McCLS scheme based on AODV (McDV) in their efficiency and effectiveness against two most common attacks (i.e. redirection attack and rushing attack). Results from theoretical analysis show that the new McCLS scheme is more efficient than existing CLS solutions, and results from empirical studies show that the McDV is able to resist the two common attacks without causing substantial degradation of the network performance. Copyright © 2006-2008 by CCC Publications.