Lightweight Broadcast Authentication Protocols Reconsidered

In the emergency broadcast system (or emergency alert system) which aims to broadcast a warning information immediately in time of emergency such as a natural or civil disaster, computational power-restricted devices such as, pocket terminals and sensors need to instantly and securely verify correctness and integrity of the received message packets. Though a lot of broadcast authentication systems were proposed, most of them require relatively high computation cost. In this paper, we propose a new lightweight broadcast authentication protocol McSBA based on McEliece signature. It can be quickly verified with a tiny computation cost, applicable on power-restricted devices. We first estimate the time performance and compare McSBA with widely used RSA signature and well- known TESLA broadcast authentication protocol, to show that the verification of McSBA has a low cost and is faster than the others. Especially, it is shown by our estimation that McSBA can verify quickly less than Is in emergency situations, however RSA signature with the same security takes more than 4s. Then we make use of a simulation of verification of RSA signature and McSBA, on the same platform, to attest that verification of McSBA is about ten times faster than RSA signature, which also supports our estimation result. Consequently, we expect that our technique is useful in the emergency broadcast system.