Continuous leakage-resilient access control for wireless sensor networks

An important objective of cryptographic schemes is to withstand various attacks, including leakage attacks. Otherwise, leakage of the secret key may cause serious threats to the security of computer systems. However, leakage attacks have not received adequate attention in the literature. For example, most of the existing security protocols in the wireless sensor networks (WSNs) lack the consideration of leakage attacks. Instead, they are only designed in the traditional security model, in which an adversary is assumed not to obtain any information of the internal secret states. Obviously, this is not ideal because partial information of the secret key may be leaked in practice due to side channel attacks or fault injection attack. In this paper, we propose a new construction of secure continuous leakage-resilient certificate-based signcryption (CBS) scheme with access control without using bilinear pairings, and its security can be proved based on the assumptions that solving the classical decisional Diffie-Hellman problem and discrete logarithm problem is infeasible. We then propose a novel certificate-based access control scheme for the WSNs. The analysis shows that our construction not only achieves high computational efficiency in the continuous leakage setting, but also has superior performance regarding communication efficiency and storage requirement.