An Efficient Broadcast Authentication Scheme in Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Abstract: Broadcast source authentication is a challenging topic in wireless sensor networks. This security service allows senders to broadcast messages to multiple receivers in a secure way. Although several authentication mechanisms have been proposed to address the need for security in WSNs, most of them are resource consuming and are inadequate for constrained environments. In this paper, we shed the light to the security vulnerabilities of symmetric key based authentication mechanisms, and their inability to tackle memory DoS attacks. Moreover, we provide a new efficient broadcast authentication scheme based on a Bloom filter data structure in order to reduce the communication overhead. Finally, we run a thorough set of simulations to assess the efficiency of our approach compared to some state of the art solutions in terms of energy consumption, communication and computation overhead. Our results provide insight into the suitability of our approach for use in WSNs.