Reliable broadcast message authentication in wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Due to the low-cost nature of sensor network nodes, we cannot generally assume the availability of a high-performance CPU and tamper-resistant hardware. Firstly, we propose a reliable broadcast message authentication working under the above-mentioned circumstances. The proposed scheme, although based on symmetric cryptographic primitives, is secure against anyone who knew the message authentication key as well as the malicious router nodes in multi-hop networks. The proposed scheme consists of three steps; (i) reliable broadcast of a message, (ii) legitimate acknowledgments from all the nodes in the network, and (iii) disclosure of the message authentication key. Secondly, we propose a way to reduce the amount of the stored information until the disclosure of the key, in which the server transmits the message integrity code of a message before transmitting the message. Finally, we consider the characteristic and the security issues of the proposed schemes. © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2006.