Design and Implementation of Hybrid Broadcast Authentication Protocols in Wireless Sensor Networks

The proposed broadcast authentication protocols for wireless sensor networks can be divided into two categories, protocols based on digital signature and protocols based on improved message authentication code. This paper implements and evaluates the performance of two broadcast authentication: TinyECC, which is based on ECDSA, and GBA, which is based on improved MAC. Through analysis of the performance difference of the two protocols, this paper proposes a hybrid broadcast authentication protocol (HBA). HBA achieves an appropriate compromise of security and performance according to packet value. The analysis and experiments show that HBA is efficient and practical.