Long Duration Broadcast Authentication for Wireless Sensor Networks

In the resource constrained Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), the broadcast authentication is widely fulfilled by the emerging delayed authentication technique. The one level backward one-way key chain in the delayed authentication technique limits heavily the duration of the broadcast authentication. In this paper, we propose a long duration broadcast authentication scheme for WSNs. The proposed scheme uses a novel hierarchical key chain to extend the duration of broadcast authentication to be as long as the whole lifetime of WSNs. Moreover, the overhead of the proposed scheme is significantly reduced compared to that with one level key chain. Extensive experimental results show that the novel hierarchical key chain fully outperforms the one level key chain in terms of memory and computation.