A SECURITY OF WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORKS – ANALYSIS ON EFFICIENT BROADCAST AUTHENTICATION

Abstract

A Broadcast Authentication is enabling with base station to send commands
and requests to low-powered sensor nodes in an authentic manner, is one of
the core challenges for securing wireless sensor networks. The multi-level
variant of μTESLA based on delayed exposure of one-way chains are well
known valuable broadcast authentication schemes, but concerns still remain
for their practical application. To use these schemes on resource-limited
sensor nodes, a 64-bit key chain is desirable for efficiency. Our work show, by
both theoretical analysis and rigorous experiments on real sensor nodes, that
if μTESLA i s i mplemented i n a raw form with 6 4-bit key chains, some of the
future keys can be discovered through time memory data tradeoff techniques.
This paper presents an extendable broadcast authentication scheme called XTESLA,
as a new member of the TESLA family, to remedy the fact that previous
schemes do not consider problems arising from sleep modes, network failures,
idle sessions, as well as the time memory data tradeoff risk, and to reduce
their high cost of countering DoS attacks. In X-TESLA, two levels of chains that
have distinct intervals and cross-authenticate each other are used. This allows
the short key chains to continue indefinitely and makes new interesting
strategies and management methods possible, significantly reducing
unnecessary computation and buffer occupation, and leads to efficient
solutions to the raised problems