Lightweight Source Authentication Mechanisms for Group Communications in Wireless Sensor Networks

The problem of providing source authentication in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) has been a roadblock to their large scale deployment, and is still in its infancy. In this paper, we present novel symmetric-key-based authentication schemes which exhibit low computation and communication authentication overhead. Our schemes are built upon the integration of a reputation mechanism, a Bloom filter, and a key binary tree for the distribution and updating of the authentication keys. Analytical evaluation of the proposed authentication schemes shows that the estimated average number of concatenated message authentication code in a packet from time 0 till time t is 4pt, with p is the probability that a key is corrupted. Our schemes are lightweight and efficient with respect to computation, communication and energy overhead.