Digital signatures are a cornerstone of modern authentication and data integrity, ensuring that messages and transactions can be verified as originating from legitimate sources. As the proliferation of resource-constrained devices—such as those found in the Internet of Things (IoT), medical sensors, and embedded systems—continues to accelerate, there is a growing need for digital signature schemes that are both efficient and secure. Current approaches to post-quantum digital signatures, particularly those based on lattice cryptography, often suffer from significant drawbacks when deployed on low-end devices. These schemes typically require complex mathematical operations, such as matrix multiplications and rejection sampling, which are computationally intensive and demand substantial memory and storage for key management.
Our researchers have developed a system and method for a new signature scheme for authentication in IoT devices. This novel lightweight algorithm meets the resource-constraining requirements of processing, memory, bandwidth, and battery life for IoT devices like implantable medical devices. The new scheme is LPQS and is based on a one-time lattice-based signature with a distributed verification process via semi-honest verification servers. This approach enables resource-limited signers to compute signatures without costly lattice, only with a low memory expansion/footprint and compact signature sizes. This new scheme also meets the NIST standard for post-quantum cryptography, ensuring long-term security in the coming age of quantum computing. The benefit of this algorithm compared to the related counterparts in terms of performance is significant; it reduces the signer memory requirement and is also faster and memory efficient on the signer’s side. The signature size in the numerical figures is 138 bits in this scheme compared to 1.2 kb in other comparable algorithms.
Flowchart for Signer for LPQ Authentication-based mechanism