A Lightweight Verifiable Secret Sharing in Internet of Things

Abstract

Verifiable Secret Sharing (VSS) is a fundamental tool of cryptography and distributed computing in Internet of Things. Since network bandwidth is a scarce resource, minimizing the number of verification data will improve the performance of VSS. Existing VSS schemes, however, face limitations in meeting the number of verification data and energy consumptions for low-end devices, which make their adoption challenging in resource-limited IoTs. To address above limitations, we propose a VSS scheme according to Nyberg’s one-way Accumulator for one-way Hash Functions (NAHFs). The proposed VSS has two distinguished features: first, the security of the scheme is based on NAHFs whose computational requirements are the basic criteria for known IoT devices and, second, upon receiving only one verification data, participants can verify the correctness of both their shares and the secret without any communication. Experimental results show that, compared to the Feldman scheme and Rajabi-Eslami scheme, the energy consumption of a participant in the proposed scheme is respectively reduced by at least 24% and 83% for a secret.