SPMAC: Scalable Prefix Verifiable Message Authentication Code for Internet of Things

Internet of Things is a valuable tool in various application domains, including smart cities, industrial production, healthcare, and so on. Every connected device can share messages with others in an IoT network. However, since such a network is vulnerable to security breaches, authenticating the integrity of these messages is essential. In addition, the message may contain sensitive information, and a portion of the information in the message needs to be authenticated. In the literature, Prefix Verifiable Message Authentication Code has been proposed under such scenario, but it only works if the portion to be authenticated is a prefix of the message. In this paper, we propose a more general scheme called Scalable Prefix Verifiable Message Authentication Code (SPMAC). It inherits the advantage of PMAC while overcoming the drawbacks. For practical SPMAC construction, we propose two provably secure generic constructions, Fibo-SPMAC and ECP-SPMAC. Both of them have practical applications in IoT scenarios. The experiment results demonstrate the performance advantage of SPMAC in terms of efficiency. Moreover, Fibo-SPMAC has a good performance when the bandwidth is limited, whereas ECP-SPMAC performs better when the bandwidth is large.