Enhancing broadcast authentication in sensor networks

• Authors: Arayeh Norouzi;Abdolreza Abhari;Truman Yang
• Venue: SpringSim '10 Proceedings of the 2010 Spring Simulation Multiconference
• Year: 2010

Due to the nature of wireless sensor networks, security is a critical problem that needs to be further researched and developed. Resource constrained and usually unattended sensors are much vulnerable to malicious attackers that may impersonate the senders by altering broadcast messages. Authenticating received messages is a crucial matter that needs to be investigated closely in this regard. Recently proposed TESLA based techniques have embarked on resolving the authentication problem by employing symmetric encryption and achieving the desired security level by mimicking asymmetric encryption through delayed key disclosure. The suggested delay renders the network vulnerable to Denial of Service attack since an adversary can flood the nodes by sending bogus messages and forcing the sensors to buffer the messages until they receive the corresponding delayed keys. Several novel techniques have been proposed to achieve immediate authentication in TESLA methods to alleviate this threat. In the process, other factors such as reliability, security and buffer requirements may have been compromised which need careful consideration. In this paper a Low Buffer μ Tesla protocol which has been presented in [1] is adapted and is altered to achieve reliability by integrating a technique presented in [2]. The integrated method should be able to achieve immediate authentication while preserving desired security and reliability and reducing memory requirements in sensor nodes.