Maximum Life-time Broadcast Authentication Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Broadcast authentication is a critical security service in wireless sensor networks (WSNs), as it allows a sender to broadcast messages to multiple nodes in an authenticated way. Symmetric key based schemes such as μTESLA and μTESLA-like schemes have been proposed to provide such services for WSNs, however, the life-time of these schemes is constrained by the length of the key chains. To address this problem, this paper propose a light-weight, scalable broadcast authentication scheme. In this paper, the proposed scheme uses series of short key chains that let the fore key chain to carry the Commitment Distribution Message (CDM) of the following key chain and amortize the CDM over multiple small parts to minimize the communication overhead. This allows the short key chains to continue indefinitely. Moreover, the comprehensive analysis shows that this scheme is efficient and robust against packet loss, and leads to efficient solution to the raised problems.