Attribute-Based Signatures With Constant-Size Signatures for Resource-Constrained IoT Applications

Abstract

The rapid expansion of the Internet of Things (IoT) has introduced critical security challenges in authentication, data integrity, and privacy preservation. Traditional digital signature schemes, such as RSA and ECDSA, rely on identity-based trust models, which face scalability bottlenecks, lack fine-grained access control, and pose privacy risks in IoT environments. Attribute-based signatures (ABS) offer a promising solution by allowing devices to sign data only if their attributes satisfy a predefined policy, without revealing their exact identity. However, most existing ABS constructions rely on pairing-based cryptography, which is vulnerable to quantum computer attacks, while lattice-based ABS schemes often suffer from either large signature sizes or dependence on non-interactive zero-knowledge (NIZK) proofs. In this paper, we propose an efficient lattice-based ABS scheme that eliminates the need for NIZK proofs while achieving constant-size signatures. Our construction leverages the lattice-based vector commitment technique to achieve quantum resistance while reducing signature size to a constant independent of the number of attributes, significantly improving efficiency compared to prior works. Experimental evaluations confirm that our scheme outperforms existing lattice-based ABS in both computational cost and signature size, particularly for large attribute sets and deep policy circuits. Our results pave the way for practical ABS deployment in resource-constrained IoT applications, such as secure firmware updates, industrial access control, and vehicular networks.