Efficient Broadcast Authentication for Wireless Sensor Networks

This work proposes a reliable and secure broadcast protocol for ad hoc wireless (sensor) networks. Since reliability and security compete for the same resources, we jointly solve for error control coding and integrity for a broadcast scenario. Hence, it is very important that data packets are received by all nodes in the network using minimum number of transmissions and with a minimum latency because of the limited resources of the sensor nodes and the urgency of the information. We assume that the adversary can drop (or modify) legitimate packets and inject its own packets by compromising nodes. Thus, it is critical that, any node receiving a malicious packet immediately filters it out and uses only the legitimate ones for forwarding to the next hop and decoding. This makes the packet authentication a very challenging problem for broadcast. We build our authentication scheme, on top of a reliable and energy-efficient broadcasting protocol called Collaborative Rateless Broadcast (CRBcast) to achieve efficiency, reliability and authenticity.