Enhanced LEAP authentication delay for higher immunity against DoS attack

Broadcast authentication is crucial for civil and military applications related to the Internet of things such as wide-area protection, and target tracking. Authentication in these scenarios is time sensitive, and needs to take into account the characteristics of the deployed devices. Even various smart communication protocols in the literature address the problem of broadcast authentication, however there is still a lack on providing practical and secure authentication solutions. In this paper, we point out the security concerns of current state of the art protocol LEAP. In particular, we address the vulnerability of LEAP to a severe denial of service attack. We propose a new authentication process in μTESLA mechanism that defeats the drawback of LEAP protocol in terms of authentication delay, and resilience to DoS attack, by managing with a simple and effective way to reduce the delay of forged packets in the receivers buffer. Furthermore, we assess the feasibility of our solution with a thorough simulation study, taking into account the authentication delay, the energy consumption and the delay of forged packets.