IMBAS: Identity-based multi-user broadcast authentication in wireless sensor networks

Multi-user broadcast authentication enables a large number of users to join in and broadcast messages to wireless sensor networks (WSN) dynamically and authentically. Public-key-based schemes have been proposed to provide such services; however, none of them achieve security, scalability and efficiency simultaneously. This paper presents IMBAS, an identity-based multi-user broadcast authentication scheme with strong security, sound scalability and efficiency for WSN. IMBAS divides broadcasts into two categories and employs different cryptographic primitives. Users’ broadcasts are secured with vBNN-IBS, a novel pairing-free identity-based signature with reduced signature size, which is proposed in this paper to achieve security, scalability and efficiency; the sink’s broadcast is secured with Schnorr signature with partial message recovery to further optimize the efficiency. Password-based user private key protection is also proposed to resist proactively the compromise attack. Theoretical analysis demonstrates that IMBAS provides strong security and sound scalability. Quantitative energy analysis shows that IMBAS reduces energy consumption by at least 41.5 percent compared with previous identity-based scheme.