BASIS: A Practical Multi-User Broadcast Authentication Scheme in Wireless Sensor Networks

Multi-user broadcast authentication is an important security service in wireless sensor networks (WSNs), as it allows a large number of mobile users of the WSNs to join in and broadcast messages to WSNs dynamically and authentically. To reduce communication cost due to the transmission of public-key certificates, broadcast authentication schemes based on identity (ID)based cryptography have been proposed, but the schemes suffer from expensive pairing computations. In this paper, to minimize computation and communication costs, we propose a new provably secure pairing-free ID-based signature schemes with message recovery, MR-IBS, and PMR-IBS. We then construct an ID-based multi-user broadcast authentication scheme, BASIS, based on MR-IBS and PMR-IBS for broadcast authentication between users and a sink. We evaluate the practical feasibility of BASIS on WSN hardware platforms, MICAz and Tmote Sky are used in real-life deployments in terms of computation/communication cost and energy consumption. Consequently, BASIS reduces the total energy consumption on Tmote Sky by up to 72% and 17% compared with Bloom filter-based authentication scheme based on a variant of ECDSA with message recovery and IMBAS based on a ID-based signature scheme with message appendix, respectively.