Efficient user and broadcast authentication scheme for WSNs

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks are collections of tiny sensors working collaboratively to gather information. Two major shortcomings of today's WSNs are scarce energy and memory resources making it difficult to devise robust and effective security measures. Keyed-hash chains have been proposed as an efficient solution. Nevertheless, the basic configuration of one-way hash chains, where a shared key is hashed with no limits on the length of the chain causes an unwanted computational overhead and a potential security breach. In this paper, we propose a mini one-way hash chain protocol for user and broadcast authentication that is as effective, while at the same time significantly reducing the computational overhead. We avoid the potential security breach by using easily computed one time authentication tokens to secure communication. We also demonstrate that our protocol is energy preserving, light and efficient. Our simulation and evaluation tests reflect its benefit over straightforwardly configured one-way hash chains.