Providing Hop-by-Hop Authentication and Source Privacy in Wireless Sensor Networks

Message authentication is one of the most effective ways to thwart unauthorized and corrupted traffic from being forwarded in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). To provide this service, a polynomial-based scheme was recently introduced. However, this scheme and its extensions all have the weakness of a built-in threshold determined by the degree of the polynomial: when the number of messages transmitted is larger than this threshold, the adversary can fully recover the polynomial. In this paper, the authors propose a scalable authentication scheme based on Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC).