Lightweight and compromise-resilient message authentication in sensor networks

Numerous authentication schemes have been proposed in the past for protecting communication authenticity and integrity in wireless sensor networks. Most of them however have following limitations: high computation or communication overhead, no resilience to a large number of node compromises, delayed authentication, lack of scalability, etc. To address these issues, we propose in this paper a novel message authentication approach which adopts a perturbed polynomial-based technique to simultaneously accomplish the goals of lightweight, resilience to a large number of node compromises, immediate authentication, scalability, and non-repudiation. Extensive analysis and experiments have also been conducted to evaluate the scheme in terms of security properties and system overhead.