🤖 AI Summary
Traditional digital signatures and existing post-quantum (PQ) signature schemes impose prohibitive computational overhead, memory footprint, and energy consumption on resource-constrained IoT devices—e.g., wearables and embedded sensors.
Method: This paper proposes LiteQSign, a lightweight quantum-resistant signature scheme. It introduces a novel, non-interactive one-time hash-based public-key generation mechanism, eliminating reliance on trusted third parties, secure enclaves, or non-colluding servers—enabling efficient authentication under a zero-trust model. Built upon hash-based signatures, LiteQSign is provably secure in the random oracle model and features a highly optimized implementation for 8-bit microcontrollers.
Contribution/Results: Experimental evaluation demonstrates that LiteQSign achieves signing throughput 20× faster than current state-of-the-art PQ schemes, with smaller private keys and signatures. Its computational and memory requirements are significantly lower than those of NIST-selected PQC standards, making it suitable for ultra-constrained edge devices.
📝 Abstract
Traditional digital signatures face significant challenges on low-end IoT devices due to limited computational power, memory, and energy resources. Simultaneously, the rise of quantum computing necessitates post-quantum (PQ) secure alternatives. However, PQ-secure signatures typically incur substantial costs, hindering their adoption in IoT applications like wearable health devices, trackers, and smart sensors, where efficient signature generation is critical for prolonged device lifespan and optimal resource utilization. To address these challenges, we present LightQSign (LightQS), a novel lightweight PQ signature scheme that achieves near-optimal signature generation efficiency with only a small, constant number of hash operations per signing process. The core innovation lies in enabling verifiers to obtain one-time hash-based public keys without interacting with signers or third parties through secure computation. This design eliminates the need for non-colluding verification servers, secure enclaves, or trusted assisting entities, thereby reducing security risks and extending IoT device battery life with minimal cryptographic overhead. We formally prove the security of LiteQS in the random oracle model and conduct a thorough performance analysis, demonstrating that it outperforms NIST PQC standards with significantly lower computational overhead, minimal memory usage, and a compact signature footprint. Experiments on an 8-bit microcontroller show that LiteQS achieves 20x faster signature generation while producing smaller signature and private key sizes compared to state-of-the-art schemes.
