An Improved Broadcast Authentication Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks Based on the Self-Reinitializable Hash Chains

Abstract

Broadcast authentication is a fundamental security primitive in wireless sensor networks (WSNs), which is a critical sensing component of IoT. Although symmetric-key-based μTESLA protocol has been proposed, some concerns about the difficulty of predicting the network lifecycle in advance and the security problems caused by an overlong long hash chain still remain. This paper presents a scalable broadcast authentication scheme named DH-μTESLA, which is an extension and improvement of μTESLA and Multilevel μTESLA, to achieve several vital properties, such as infinite lifecycle of hash chains, security authentication, scalability, and strong tolerance of message loss. The proposal consists of the t,n-threshold-based self-reinitializable hash chain scheme (SRHC-TD) and the d-left-counting-Bloom-filter-based authentication scheme (AdlCBF). In comparison to other broadcast authentication protocols, our proposal achieves more security properties such as fresh node’s participation and DoS resistance. Furthermore, the reinitializable hash chain constructed in SRHC-TD is proved to be secure and has less computation and communication overhead compared with typical solutions, and efficient storage is realized based on AdlCBF, which can also defend against DoS attacks.