Empirical Studies of TESLA Protocol: Properties, Implementations, and Replacement of Public Cryptography Using Biometric Authentication

Abstract

This study discusses the general overview of Timed Efficient Stream Loss-tolerant Authentication (TESLA) protocol, including its properties, key setups, and improvement protocols. The discussion includes a new proposed two-level infinite <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\mu $ </tex-math></inline-formula> TESLA (TLI <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\mu $ </tex-math></inline-formula> TESLA) protocol that solves the authentication delay and synchronization issues. We theoretically compared TLI <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\mu $ </tex-math></inline-formula> TESLA with the previously proposed protocols in terms of security services and showed that the new protocol prevents excessive use of the buffer in the sensor node and reduces the DoS attacks on the network. In addition, it accelerates the authentication process of the broadcasted message with less delay and assures continuous receipt of packets compared to previous TESLA Protocols. We also addressed the challenges faced during the implementation of TESLA protocol and presented the recent solutions and parameter choices for improving the efficiency of the TESLA protocol. Moreover, we focused on utilizing biometric authentication as a promising approach to replace public cryptography in the authentication process.