Enhancing broadcast authentication in sensor networks

Due to the nature of wireless sensor networks, security is a critical problem since resource constrained and usually unattended sensors are much vulnerable to malicious attackers that may impersonate the sender. Therefore authenticating received messages is a crucial matter to protect the system integrity. Generally used TESLA (Timed Efficient Stream Loss-tolerant Authentication) based authentication techniques involve consecutive delays for decryption purposes. These delays render the network vulnerable to different malicious attacks such as Denial of Service attack. As several techniques try to achieve immediate authentication to alleviate these threats, other factors such as reliability and buffer requirements may have been compromised. This project proposes an integration of Low Buffer ,uTESLA protocol and an immediate authentication protocol to achieve a new refined scheme in broadcast authentication in sensor networks. Performance analysis and simulation results demonstrate that the proposed method succeeds to achieve immediate authentication while preserving desired security and low memory requirements in sensor nodes.