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

Broadcast authentication is a fundamental security service in distributed sensor networks. A scheme named μTESLA has been proposed for efficient broadcast authentication in such networks. However, μTESLA 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 μTESLA in large sensor networks. This paper presents a novel technique to replace the unicast-based initialization with a broadcast-based one. As a result, μTESLA 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.