How to Prove Yourself to Multiple Parties: Energy-Efficient Multi-group Authentication

Zero-knowledge identification (ZKI) schemes have been studied extensively in the cryptology literature and are currently being used commercially for radio frequency identification (RFID) authentication. Much like the public key cryptosystems that may be used to ensure message confidentiality, ZKI schemes rely on the hardness of certain problems -- e.g., factoring the product of large primes -- to provide secure authentication. In this paper, we extend existing ZKI schemes based on error-correcting codes to support multi-group authentication. In particular, we propose two schemes that enable a prover to simultaneously authenticate its membership in M ≥ 1 groups. The proposed multi-group authentication protocols are of particular relevance to military ad hoc networks, where group communications is the norm and energy efficiency is a critical performance metric.