Title: Lightweight secure group communications for resource constrained devices

Authors: Wafa Ben Jaballah; Mohamed Mosbah; Habib Youssef; Akka Zemmari

Addresses: LaBRI/CNRS, University of Bordeaux, 351 Cours de la Libération, Talence, France ' LaBRI/CNRS, Polytechnic Institute of Bordeaux, 351 Cours de la Libération, Talence, France ' University of Sousse, ISITCOM, GP1, Hammam Sousse, Tunisia ' LaBRI/CNRS, University of Bordeaux, 351 Cours de la Libération, Talence, France

Abstract: Providing source authentication service in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) is still a potential stumbling block to the wide deployment of these resource constrained devices. In this paper, we present several broadcast authentication solutions that have been developed for secure group communications in WSNs, and we come up with two novel symmetric-key-based authentication schemes. Our protocols are built upon the integration of a reputation generator on each node, a key binary tree for the efficient distribution and updating of the authentication group keys. Moreover, we refer to a Bloom filter data structure to reduce the communication overhead. We assess the feasibility of our two proposed schemes with a thorough mathematical study, estimating the average number of concatenated message authentication code, the energy consumption overhead, and the probability of detection of two state-of-the-art attacks.

Keywords: wireless sensor networks; WSNs; source authentication; reputation generator; key binary tree; secure group communications; resource constraints; network security; symmetric keys; Bloom filter; energy consumption; attack detection.

DOI: 10.1504/IJSSC.2015.073696

International Journal of Space-Based and Situated Computing, 2015 Vol.5 No.4, pp.187 - 200

Received: 17 Dec 2013
Accepted: 19 Sep 2014

Published online: 16 Dec 2015 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article