Tuning On-Air Signatures for Balancing Performance and Confidentiality

In this paper, we investigate the trade off between performance and confidentiality in signature-based air indexing schemes for wireless data broadcast. Two metrics, namely, false drop probability and false guess probability, are defined to quantify the filtering efficiency and confidentiality loss of a signature scheme. Our analysis reveals that false drop probability and false guess probability share a similar trend as the tuning parameters of a signature scheme change and it is impossible to achieve a low false drop probability and a high false guess probability simultaneously. In order to balance the performance and confidentiality, we perform an analysis to provide a guidance for parameter settings of the signature schemes to meet different system requirements. In addition, we propose the jump pointer technique and the XOR signature scheme to further improve the performance and confidentiality. A comprehensive simulation has been conducted to validate our findings.