On broadcast authentication in wireless sensor networks

Broadcast authentication is a critical security service in wireless sensor networks (WSNs), since it enables users to broadcast the WSN in an authenticated way. Symmetric key based schemes such as mu TESLA and multilevel mu TESLA have been proposed to provide such services for WSNs; however, these schemes all suffer from serious DoS attacks because of the delayed message authentication. This paper presents several effective public key based schemes to achieve immediate broadcast authentication and thus overcome the vulnerability presented in the mu TESLA-like schemes. Several cryptographic building blocks, including Merkle hash tree and ID-based signature scheme, are adopted to minimize the scheme overhead regarding the costs in both computation and communication. A quantitative analysis on energy consumption of the proposed schemes are given in detail. We believe that this paper can serve as the start point towards fully solving the important multisender broadcast authentication problem in WSNs.