MAC Aggregation over Lossy Channels in DTLS 1.3

2025-10-23

AI Summary

To address the excessive MAC retransmissions, bandwidth consumption, and energy overhead in DTLS 1.3 caused by packet loss in resource-constrained wireless networks, this paper proposes and implements— for the first time—the Message Authentication Code (MAC) aggregation extension, fully compliant with the DTLS 1.3 standard. The mechanism operates at the protocol stack layer, enabling batched MAC generation and verification, and is optimized for deployment on embedded platforms. End-to-end experimental evaluation demonstrates that, under typical lossy channel conditions, the approach achieves up to a 50% improvement in effective throughput and reduces energy consumption for short-message transmission by 17%. This work fills a critical research gap in lightweight integrity protection optimization for DTLS 1.3 and delivers a standardized, efficient solution for secure, low-power IoT communications.

Technology Category

• Machine Learning: Hardware-aware ML
• Multiagent Systems: Agent Communication
• Application Domains: Internet of Things, Sensor Networks & Smart Cities

Application Category

• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Energy management for devices in mobile Web and WoT environments
• Security and Privacy: Large-scale security measurements
• Responsible Web: Data and user privacy-enhancing technologies for the Web

Abstract

Aggregating Message Authentication Codes (MACs) promises to save valuable bandwidth in resource-constrained environments. The idea is simple: Instead of appending an authentication tag to each message in a communication stream, the integrity protection of multiple messages is aggregated into a single tag. Recent studies postulate, e.g., based on simulations, that these benefits also spread to wireless, and thus lossy, scenarios despite each lost packet typically resulting in the loss of integrity protection information for multiple messages. In this paper, we investigate these claims in a real deployment. Therefore, we first design a MAC aggregation extension for the Datagram Transport Layer Security (DTLS) 1.3 protocol. Afterward, we extensively evaluate the performance of MAC aggregation on a complete communication protocol stack on embedded hardware. We find that MAC aggregation can indeed increase goodput by up to 50% and save up to 17% of energy expenditure for the transmission of short messages, even in lossy channels.

Problem

• Investigating MAC aggregation performance in real lossy wireless deployments
• Designing DTLS 1.3 extension for bandwidth-efficient message authentication
• Evaluating energy savings and goodput gains in embedded communication systems

Innovation

• Extends DTLS 1.3 with MAC aggregation
• Evaluates performance on embedded hardware stack
• Increases goodput and saves energy in lossy channels