Computationally Efficient Mutual Entity Authentication in Wireless Sensor Networks

Mutual entity authentication plays an important role in securing wireless sensor networks. In this paper, we present a computationally efficient authentication framework, based on learning parity with noise problem. The authentication only requires the simplest bitoperations, which makes it suitable for resource-restrained wireless sensor networks. The framework not only presents an approach to securely combine two one-way authentication protocols from the HB-family, but also provides significant enhancements in terms of feasibility of storage/communication requirement. It spawns three specific protocols with different trade-offs between communication overload and memory cost. We extensively analyze their performance and security properties. Furthermore, their applications in different wireless sensor network scenarios are discussed in detail.