On the Design of Blockchain-Based ECDSA With Fault-Tolerant Batch Verification Protocol for Blockchain-Enabled IoMT

Abstract

The blockchain-enabled internet of medical things (IoMT) is an emerging paradigm that could provide strong trust establishment and ensure the traceability of data sharing in the IoMT networks. One of the fundamental building blocks for Blockchain is Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA). Nevertheless, when processing a large number of transactions, the verification of multiple signatures will incur cumbersome overhead to the nodes in Blockchain. Although batch verification is able to provide a promising approach that verifies multiple signatures simultaneously and efficiently, the upper bound of batch size is limited to small-scale and the efficiency will drop rapidly as the batch size grows in the state-of-the-art ECDSA batch schemes. Meanwhile, most of the existing researches only focus on improving the efficiency of batch verification algorithms in various cryptosystem while ignoring the identification of invalid signatures, which could cause severe performance degradation when the batch verification fails. Motivated by these observations, this paper proposes an efficient and large-scale batch verification scheme with group testing technology based on ECDSA. The application of the presented protocols in Bitcoin and Hyperledger Fabric has been analyzed as supportive and effective. When the batch verification returns a false result, we utilize group testing technology to improve the efficiency of identifying invalid signatures. Comprehensive simulation results demonstrate that our protocol outperforms the related ECDSA batch verification schemes.