An Attack-Resistant Lightweight Digital Signature Based on an Elliptic Curve for Improved Security in Resource Constrained Applications

Abstract

Despite the fact that ECDSA is the most innovative asymmetric digital signature technique, experts are working tirelessly to strengthen it to survive various challenges. Both internal and external attacks can occur from intruders. An end-user, a malware-infected IT component, a physical attacker who operates within the environment's security perimeter, or a physical person who directly interacts with the environment, manages the hardware, or even communicates with the end-user (i.e., a malicious signer). In contrast, an external attack involves the attacker moving outside the signature environment's security boundary, possibly across a network. Attacks on interfaces place more emphasis on the protocols that a device employs to interact with the outside world rather than on the machine itself. The proposed work presents a solution to an improved, lightweight ECDSA which is resistant to MITM, Replay and forgery attacks than its counterparts. The comparison of the proposed ECDSA is compared with its counterpart and cryptanalysis is performed to prove that the proposed ECDSA is more relevant in real time since the Zhong's Method takes 13.28% less time to sign data than the Suggested ECDSA method. The Suggested technique stands out in broader application areas where calculation time is a concern since it requires 8.2% less time than Zhong's Method for Signature verification at the Receiver end.