Data Authentication Model Based on Reed-solomon Error-correcting Codes in Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract We consider the problem of authenticating the packets transmitted over a Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) controlled by an adversary who may perform arbitrary attacks on the packets: He may drop or modify the chosen packets. The prior works on the data authentication problem of WSN have focused on a less powerful adversarial network model or have examined a considerably more restrictive setting with specific timing or structural assumptions about WSN. We also model the ability of WSN to modify a data of n packets with a parameter: the survival rate α (0 < α≤ 1) denoting the fraction of the packets that are guaranteed to reach any particular receiver unmodified. Combining error-correcting codes with standard cryptographic primitives, our approach gives almost the same security guarantees as if each packet was individually signed, but requires only one signature operation for the entire data and adds to each transmitted packet only a small amount of authentication information. We prove the security and correctness of our scheme and analyze its performance in terms of communication overhead and computational effort at the sender and the receiver. We also compare our scheme with other typical data authentication model of WSN, and the results show that our scheme not only provides the authenticity authentication, but also has the lower overhead. Therefore, our model is suitable for application in large-scale WSN.