Efficient Distribution of Key Chain Commitments for Broadcast Authentication in Distributed Sensor Networks

Abstract

Broadcast authentication is a fundamental security service in distributed sensor networks.A scheme named TESLA has been proposed for efficient broadcast authentication in such networks.However, TESLA requires initial distribution of certain information based on unicast between the base station and each sensor node before the actual authentication of broadcast messages.Due to the limited bandwidth in wireless sensor networks, this initial unicast-based distribution severely limits the application of TESLA in large sensor networks.This paper presents a novel technique to replace the unicast-based initialization with a broadcast-based one.As a result, TESLA can be used in a sensor network with a large amount of sensors, as long as the message from the base station can reach these sensor nodes.This paper further explores several techniques that improve the performance, the robustness, as well as the security of the proposed method.The resulting protocol satisfies several nice properties, including low overhead, tolerance of message loss, scalability to large networks, and resistance to replay attacks as well as some known Denial of Service (DOS) attacks.least 4000308 10240 = 93.75seconds even if the channel utilization is perfect.Such a method certainly cannot scale up to very large sensor networks, which may have thousands of nodes.In this paper, we propose an extension to TESLA to address the above limitation.The basic idea is to predetermine and broadcast the initial parameters required by TESLA instead of unicast-based message transmission.In the simplest form, our extension distributes the TESLA parameters during the initialization of the sensor nodes (e.g., along with the master key shared between each sensor and the base station).To provide more flexibility, especially to prolong the life time of TESLA without requiring a very long key chain, we introduce a multi-level key chain scheme, in which the higher-level key chains are used to authenticate the commitments of lower-level ones.To further improve the survivability of the scheme against message loss and Denial of Service (DOS) attacks, we use redundant message transmission and random selection strategies to deal with the messages that distribute key chain commitments.The resulting scheme removes the requirement of unicast-based initial communication between base station and sensor nodes while keeping the nice properties of TESLA (e.g., tolerance of message loss, resistance to replay attacks).Our implementation and experiments further demonstrate that our scheme can tolerate high channel loss rate and is resistant to certain known DOS attacks to a certain degree.The rest of this paper is organized as follows.The next section gives a brief overview of TESLA and its extensions.Section 3 presents the development of our multi-level key chain scheme.Section 4 describes the implementation and experiments with our scheme.Section 5 discusses the related work, and section 6 concludes the paper and points out some future research directions.Appendix A presents the details of the two-level key chain scheme, from which the multi-level key chain is extended.