In distributed sensor networks, the researches for authentication in sensor network have been focused on broadcast authentication.
In this paper, we propose a message and its origin authentication protocol for data aggregation in sensor networks, based
on one way hash chain and Merkle tree authentication with pre-deployment knowledge. Proposed protocol provides not only for
downstream messages but also for upstream messages among neighbors, and it solves the secret value update issue with multiple
Merkle trees and unbalanced energy consumption among sensor nodes with graceful handover of aggregator. In treating compromised
node problem, our protocol provides an equivalent security level of pair-wise key sharing scheme, while much less memory requirements
compared to pair-wise key sharing scheme.
Keywords sensor networks - aggregation - authentication - Merkle tree - hash chain
This research was supported by the MIC(Ministry of Information and Communication), Korea, under the ITRC(Information Technology
Research Center) support program supervised by the IITA(Institute of Information Technology Assessment), and supported by
grant No. R01-2006-000-10957-0(2006) from the Basic Research Program of the Korea Science & Engineering Foundation.