Effective Multi-user Broadcast Authentication in Wireless Sensor Networks

Broadcast authentication is a critical security service in wireless sensor networks (WSNs), as it allows the mobile users of WSNs to broadcast messages to multiple sensor nodes in a secure way. Previous solutions on broadcast authentication are mostly symmetric-key-based solutions such as μTESLA and multilevel μTESLA. These schemes are usually efficient; however, they all suffer from severe energy-depletion attacks resulted from the nature of delayed message authentication. Being aware of the security vulnerability inherent to existing solutions, we present several efficient public-key-based schemes in this chapter to achieve immediate broadcast authentication with significantly improved security strength. Our schemes are built upon the unique integration of several cryptographic techniques, including the Bloom filter, the partial message recovery signature scheme and the Merkle hash tree. We prove the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed schemes by a comprehensive quantitative analysis of their energy consumption regarding both computation and communication. Index: Security, Wireless Sensor Networks, Broadcast Authentication, Multi-user Encyclopedia on Ad Hoc and Ubiquitous Computing, edited by Dharma Agrawal and Bin Xie, World Scientific, 2009