A Bidirectional Broadcasting Authentication Scheme for Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Broadcast authentication is an important prerequisite for secure data diffusion in the wireless sensor networks (WSN). It allows a base station to send commands and requests to multiple sensor nodes in a dynamic and authentic manner. During the past few years, several public key based multi-user broadcast authentication schemes have been proposed, such as µTESLA scheme and its variants. These schemes are associated with large buffer due to the delayed authentication of the message, which can incurred a series of problems such as high energy consumption and long verification delay. In this contribution, we propose an improved broadcast authentication scheme named bidirectional broadcasting authentication scheme based on the Merkle Hash tree and µTESLA protocol. The main idea of our scheme is adding a verify node in the Merkle Hash tree broadcast authentication, which is responsible for storing the entire hash tree. When the node receives a packet from other nodes, it sends an authentication request to the verify node and the verify node will send the authentication data of the node to the requesting node, and then requesting node receives the authentication packet and authenticate it. As a result, our scheme can reduce the transmission overhead and realize the two-way secure communication between central node and leaf node.