An efficient source authentication scheme in wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSN) are being widely deployed in military, healthcare and commercial environments. Since sensor networks pose unique challenges, traditional security methods, commonly used in enterprise networks, cannot be directly applied. In particular, broadcast source authentication is a critical security service in wireless sensor networks since it allows senders to broadcast messages to multiple receivers in a secure way. Public-key cryptography based solutions such as Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) and Identity Based Cryptography (IBC) have been proposed but they all suffer from severe energy depletion attacks, resulting from a high computational and communication overheads. In this paper, we present a novel symmetric-key-based authentication scheme that exhibits low broadcast authentication overhead and thus avoiding the problem flaws inherent to the public key cryptography based schemes. Our scheme is built upon the integration of multi-level μTesla protocol, staggered authentication and the Bloom Filter. We show that our authentication scheme is very efficient in terms of energy consumption related to both computation and communication.