Data verification in information-centric networking with efficient revocable certificateless signature

Information-centric networking (ICN), a strong candidate for future internet architecture, consists of two kinds of packets, interest and data packets, both of which carry the name of data content to be requested (or delivered). The data packet is associated with a public key signature so that the data receiver can verify the data packet's correctness, integrity and provenance. Certificate-based signature (based on Public Key Infrastructure-PKI) and ID-based signature have been proposed to meet this purpose. In this paper, we propose to apply certificateless signature to fulfill this aim, because it not only mitigates the demand of PKI (for certificate-based signature), but also eliminates the key escrow problem (for identity-based signature), while still being able to leverage the ICN's naming feature. Moreover, it is essentially important to allow efficient user revocation for any signature scheme to better meet applications' demand. Motivated by these, we propose an efficient revocable certificateless signature scheme, greatly reducing the revocation complexity from linear (with respect to the works in the literature) to logarithmic complexity. The proposed scheme is based on the two key techniques, cover set and secret sharing technique, and is provably secure in the random oracle model. In addition, we present the case study of applying the proposed revocable certificateless signature in the ICN and evaluate the scheme's performance to show its feasibility.