Comparative study of multicast authentication schemes with application to wide-area measurement system

Yee Wei Law, Zheng Gong, Tie Luo, Slaven Marusic, Marimuthu Palaniswami
2013 Proceedings of the 8th ACM SIGSAC symposium on Information, computer and communications security - ASIA CCS '13  
Multicasting refers to the transmission of a message to multiple receivers at the same time. To enable authentication of sporadic multicast messages, a conventional digital signature scheme is appropriate. To enable authentication of a multicast data stream, however, an authenticated multicast or multicast authentication (MA) scheme is necessary. An MA scheme can be constructed from a conventional digital signature scheme or a multiple-time signature (MTS) scheme. A number of MTS-based MA
more » ... s have been proposed over the years. Here, we formally analyze four MA schemes, namely BiBa, TV-HORS, SCU+ and TSV+. Among these MA schemes, SCU+ is an MA scheme we constructed from an MTS scheme designed for secure code update, and TSV+ is our patched version of TSV, an MA scheme which we show to be vulnerable. Based on our simulation-validated analysis, which complements and at places rectifies or improves existing analyses, we compare the schemes' computational and communication efficiencies relative to their security levels. For numerical comparison of the schemes, we use parameters relevant for a smart (power) grid component called wide-area measurement system. Our comparison shows that TV-HORS, while algorithmically unsophisticated and not the best performer in all categories, is the most balanced performer. SCU+, TSV+ and by implication the schemes from which they are extended do not offer clear advantages over BiBa, the oldest among the schemes. * Zheng Gong is also affiliated with State
doi:10.1145/2484313.2484349 dblp:conf/ccs/LawGLMP13 fatcat:qwwolmqcm5gdzl3jfqbuoh4xzu