IDHC: ID-based Hash-Chains for broadcast authentication in wireless networks

This paper presents an authentication scheme (IDHC) based on an original concept that combines a simple form of identity-based cryptography with the Lamport’s keyed hash chain method. In this solution, users contact a key distribution center (KDC) and receive a master authentication ticket M tightly bound to the users’ identity. M is used as a seed to generate a chain of authentication tickets as with Lamport’s keyed hash chain scheme. Our authentication scheme is designed for loosely timesynchronized users and achieves low communication and computation overhead, scales to large number of receivers, and tolerates packet loss. As opposed to other broadcast authentication schemes available in the literature, our solution does not rely on any public key infrastructure and there is no need for public key certificates. Further, there is no need for an organizational structure among users or between users and the KDC. IDHC is particularly suitable for multiple and dynamic sources of broadcast traffic and we provide a challenging application of our scheme that offers peer authentication to secure the on-demand dynamic source routing (DSR) protocol for ad hoc networks. A security analysis, performance evaluation and storage requirements of the IDHC scheme are also provided in the paper.