An Efficient Broadcast Authentication Scheme For Wireless Sensor Networks

Networks security is the important part of networks technology. Due to the opening of the distribution environment and limited resource, wireless sensor networks receive more attacks than traditional networks. In many applications, higher security requirements for wireless sensor networks have been proposed, broadcast is the base of networks security, the aim is to prove identity of sensors and source of information.In this paper, the concepts, the system structure and the secure problems of wireless sensor networks are introduced firstly. Then we analyze the design goals of secure scheme. As an essential security service in wireless sensor networks, the broadcast authentication is mainly discussed. Accordingly, various cryptographic primitives for broadcast authentication and their present schemes are analyzed. Based on the study above, we propose a novel scheme for broadcast authentication--an efficient broadcast authentication scheme based on the Merkle hash tree.Due to employ the Merkle tree, EBAS scheme greatly reduces the size of public keys of traditional one-time signature. EBAS scheme uses the mechanism that there is one signature in one message packet. The signature of every message contains corresponding authentication path and the public keys, receivers can check the source and veracity of the received messages in time. EBAS scheme removes the authentication delay. EBAS scheme consists of three steps: key generation, signing and verifying. The realization of every step would be described in detail. In order to possibly reduce the overhead, we optimize the parameter of Merkle tree. Finally, compared with the u TESLA scheme under DoS attacks and communication failures, simulation results showed that our technique outperform present schemes in terms of security, authentication rate and storage space.