Energy Efficient and Secure Multi-User Broadcast Authentication Scheme in Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks (WSN) comprises of many clusters with sensor nodes. All the sensor nodes in the cluster joins together and dnamically broadcast the latest sensed data in the network. Due to the dispersed quality and forwarding nature of WSNs, they are almost used in all the real time applications for which multi user authentication is necessitous which can still lead to impersonation attacks (Attacker node act as legitimate node and sends bogus broadcast messages in the network). An Identity based scheme along with sink node is proposed in order to provide a secure broadcast authentication and minimizes the transmission rates and computation based on ECC (Elliptical Curve Cryptography). Initially the sink node generates public and private keys based on node ID using ECC and distributes the private key to the node in the network and public key to the user. The user encrypts and broadcast the control message using the public key to validate its authentication while the node decrypts the broadcast message using its private key provided by the sink. If the signature gets validated the node and the user will authenticate each other, else the connection will be refused which can prevent impersonation attack. In the attack scenario, if the attacker pretends to be a legitimate user and sends bogus broadcast messages, the attacker is dredged due to the mismatch that occurs while the signature is verified. This authentication scheme provides high security and daunts the attacker from the network. WSN consumes high energy during data transmission. To improvise the energy efficiency this project exploits low energy consumption MAC protocols. An energy-efficient data collection is done in WSNs by integrating IEEE 802.15.4/ZigBee standards in MAC layer. The main objective of the proposed work is to perform broadcast after authentication, to prevent resource consuming attacks through authentication and to reduce the energy wastage along with security in WSN communication.