Network Security

A broadcast authentication mechanism is important in wireless sensor networks assuring receivers of a packet’s validity. To provide authentication some researchers utilize one way key chains and delayed disclosure of keys; however such an approach requires time synchronization and delayed authentication. Another technique uses one-time signature schemes. Unfortunately such schemes suffer from large key sizes and limited number of uses per key. To cope with these problems we propose an efficient one-time signature-based broadcast authentication scheme for wireless sensor networks that reduces storage usage and includes a re-keying mechanism. Keywords: Authentication re-keying mechanism hash trees.