Containing denial-of-service attacks in broadcast authentication in sensor networks

Abstract

Broadcast authentication is an important application in sensor networks. Public Key Cryptography (PKC) is desirable for this application, but due to the resource constraints on sensor nodes, these operations are expensive, which means sensor networks using PKC are susceptible to Denial of Service (DoS) attacks: attackers keep broadcasting bogus messages, which will incur extra costs, thus exhaust the energy of the honest nodes. In addition, the long time to verify each message using PKC increases the response time of the nodes; it is impractical for the nodes to validate each incoming message before forwarding i.