Performance of two one-time signature schemes in space/time constrained environments

One Time Signatures are based on the idea of committing a secret key via one-way functions, decreasing dramatically the signing and verification times when compared to asymmetric primitives. This important feature made them attractive for application fields (like wireless and sensor networks) that have limited memory or computing resources at disposal, but which require fast response times for security operations. In this paper, we describe and evaluate two one-time signature schemes — named FMTseq and Log-Logseq — appropriate for sensor networks, which exploit Merkle hash tree-based one time signature scheme and recent techniques proposed to traverse Merkle trees efficiently so that to save space and/or time when signing several messages at a time. Through experiments, we compare the performance of these schemes with the approach in which multiple signatures are calculated with traditional asymmetric algorithms, e.g. RSA, ECDSA and DSA, and we discuss the pros and cons of the schemes considered in our approach.