A broadcast authentication scheme in IoT environments

Abstract

Broadcast authentication has been widely investigated in the context of wireless sensor networks, Internet, RFIDs, and other scenarios. With the emergence of the Internet of Things that allows to connect different wireless technologies to provide services, broadcast authentication is crucial. Broadcast authentication aims to confirm that the sender of the message is the pretended source. In this direction, different state of the art proposals address this problem either by reducing the communication and overhead burden of security solutions, or by reducing the impact of attacks that aim to jeopordize the effectiveness of the service. In this paper, we propose an improved authentication scheme that is efficient for resource constrained devices. In particular, we shed the light into the security vulnerabilities of lightweight authentication mechanisms and their inability to tackle memory DoS attacks. Hence, we propose an improved scheme derived from the streamlined μTESLA, referred to as X-μTESLA. We demonstrate through our analytical and simulation results that X-μTESLA reduces communication overhead and yields a better performance in terms of energy consumption, memory overhead, and authentication delay than its previous counterparts.