Energy-efficient message authentication for IEEE 802.15.4-based wireless sensor networks

The number of wirelessly connected devices is expected to increase to a few tens of billions by the year 2020. Newer generations of products and applications will sharpen demands for ultra-low energy consuming wireless devices. Various techniques for energy saving based on Discontinuous Reception (DRX) are known. However, DRX is vulnerable to unauthorized or fake trigger requests by malicious adversaries aiming to drain a device´s battery. Existing message authentication methods can identify spoofed messages, but they require the reception of a complete message before its authenticity can be verified. In this paper, we present a method which inserts authentication checkpoints at several positions within a message. This enables a device to identify that a message is unauthorized and turn its radio receiver off as soon as the first checkpoint fails. The presented method has a low complexity with respect to the computational and memory resources and does not slow down the receiver. It can maintain the packet format prescribed by the IEEE 802.15.4 specification, which provides for backward compatibility. Finally, it incorporates authentication checkpoints at the MAC layer, which allows nodes that do not employ the presented method to participate in the communication.