Lightweight secure group communications for resource constrained devices

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.