Hybrid Multi-user Broadcast Authentication for Wireless Sensor Networks

In wireless sensor networks (WSNs), broadcast authentication allows only legitimate users (or senders) to disseminate messages into the networks. μTESLA [14] is the first broadcast authentication scheme for WSNs. It allows only few users, mainly several base stations, to broadcast messages, but in reality there are many scenarios that require a large number of dynamic users (mobile sinks or users) [17]. Until now, only few schemes have dealt with multiple broadcasting users based on public key cryptosystem [16, 17]. However, these schemes require heavy computation and communication overhead on sensor nodes. To minimize the overhead, we propose a hybrid multi-user broadcast authentication scheme for WSNs.