Multi‐user broadcast authentication scheme for wireless sensor network based on elliptic curve cryptography

Abstract

Abstract Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have found use in many areas ranging from military to healthcare among other areas of interest. Multiuser broadcast authentication is an important security feature in WSNs that can enable users to securely broadcast their data in a WSN. By its very nature, a WSN is resource constrained in nature making security implementation on such a network a major challenge of concern. In this paper, we present an efficient pairing‐free broadcast authentication (BA) scheme with message recovery based on a lightweight digital signature protocol for use on WSNs. Our proposed BA scheme is able to accelerate message authentication broadcasted over a WSN while providing user anonymity. Comparing our proposed BA scheme with previous existing and related BA schemes, we have demonstrated that a reduction in computation, communication, and energy cost is possible making our scheme efficient for use on WSNs.

Keywords

• broadcast authentication
• elliptic curve cryptography
• identity‐based signature scheme
• wireless sensor networks