SOURCE PRIVACY WITH HOP-BY-HOP MESSAGE AUTHENTICATION IN WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORKS

Message authentication plays a key role in thwarting unauthorized and corrupted messages from being forwarded in networks to save the precious sensor energy. For this reason, many authentication schemes have been proposed in literature to provide message authenticity and integrity verification for wireless sensor networks. In this abstract, we propose an unconditionally secure and efficient source anonymous message authentication (SAMA) scheme based on the optimal modified ElGamal signature (MES) scheme on elliptic curves. This MES scheme is secure against adaptive chosen-message attacks in the random oracle model. Our scheme enables the intermediate nodes to authenticate the message so that all corrupted message can be detected and dropped to con- serve the sensor power. While achieving compromise resiliency, flexible-time authentication and source identity protection, our scheme does not have the threshold problem. We develop a source anonymous message authentication code (SAMAC) on elliptic curves that can provide unconditional source anonymity. We offer an efficient hop-by-hop message authentication mechanism for WSNs without the threshold limitation. We devise network implementation criteria on source node privacy protection in WSNs. We propose an efficient key management framework to ensure isolation of the compromised nodes. Both theoretical analysis and simulation results demonstrate that our proposed scheme is more efficient than the polynomial-based algorithms under comparable security levels.