Aiming at the problems of network security such as information disclosure and tampering in the process of information exchange for railway bridge monitoring systems under open Internet environment, a data transmission protocol based on short signature scheme was proposed for railway bridge monitoring. Firstly, an identity-based short signature scheme was designed on the basis of Boneh's short signature. Then the scheme was proved to be safe under the random oracle model and the Inverse Computational Diffie-Hellman Problem (Inv-CDHP), and it was further applied to the data transmission protocol for railway bridge monitoring. Finally, the key code of the scheme was given and compared with several schemes. The experimental results and analysis show that the average time consumption of the proposed scheme is close to the classical Boneh's scheme, but 6% and 22% lower than that of Fangguo Zhang's scheme and Leyou Zhang's scheme. Therefore, the proposed scheme has more advantages in terms of signature length and efficiency, and can effectively solve the problem of lack of integrity protection and identity reliability authentication of monitoring data.