Underwater wireless sensor networks (UWSNs) have emerged as the most widely used wireless network infrastructure in many applications. Sensing nodes are frequently deployed in hostile aquatic environments in order to collect data on resources that are severely limited in terms of transmission time and bandwidth. Since underwater information is very sensitive and unique, the authentication of users is very important to access the data and information. UWSNs have unique communication and computation needs that are not met by the existing digital signature techniques. As a result, a lightweight signature scheme is required to meet the communication and computation requirements. In this research, we present a Certificateless Online/Offline Signature (COOS) mechanism for UWSNs. The proposed scheme is based on the concept of a hyperelliptic curves cryptosystem, which offers the same degree of security as RSA, bilinear pairing, and elliptic curve cryptosystems (ECC) but with a smaller key size. In addition, the proposed scheme was proven secure in the random oracle model under the hyperelliptic curve discrete logarithm problem. A security analysis was also carried out, as well as comparisons with appropriate current online/offline signature schemes. The comparison demonstrated that the proposed scheme is superior to the existing schemes in terms of both security and efficiency. Additionally, we also employed the fuzzy-based Evaluation-based Distance from Average Solutions (EDAS) technique to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.
Keywords: authentication scheme; certificateless online/offline signature; underwater wireless sensor networks.