Mul-IBS: a multivariate identity-based signature scheme compatible with IoT-based NDN architecture

It has been forty years since the TCP/IP protocol blueprint, which is the core of the modern worldwide Internet, was published. Over this long period, technology has made rapid progress. These advancements are slowly putting pressure and new demands on the underlying network architecture design. Therefore, there was a need for innovations that could handle the increasing demands of new technologies like IoT while ensuring secrecy and privacy. It is how named data networking (NDN) came into the picture. NDN enables robust data distribution with interest-based content retrieval and a leave-copy-everywhere caching policy. Even though NDN has surfaced as a future envisioned and decisive machinery for data distribution in IoT, it suffers from new data security challenges like content poisoning attacks. In this attack, an attacker attempts to introduce poisoned content with an invalid signature into the network. Given the circumstances, there is a need for a cost-effective signature scheme, requiring inexpensive computing resources and fast when implemented. An identity-based signature scheme (IBS) is the natural choice to address this problem. Herein, we present an IBS, namely Mul-IBS relying on multivariate public key cryptography (MPKC), which leads the race among the post-quantum cryptography contenders. A 5-pass identification scheme accompanying a safe and secure signature scheme based on MPKC works as key ingredients of our design. Our Mul-IBS attains optimal master public key size, master secret key size, and user's secret key size in the context of multivariate identity-based signatures. The proposed scheme Mul-IBS is proven to be secure in the model, existential unforgeability under chosen-message and chosen identity attack (uf-cma), contingent upon the fact that Multivariate Quadratic (MQ) problem is NP-hard. The proposed design Mul-IBS can be utilized as a crucial cryptographic building block to build a robust and resilient IoT-based NDN architecture.