BAS: The Biphase Authentication Scheme for Wireless Sensor Networks

The development of wireless sensor networks can be considered as the beginning of a new generation of applications. Authenticity of communicating entities is essential for the success of wireless sensor networks. Authentication in wireless sensor networks is always a challenging task due to broadcast nature of the transmission medium. Sensor nodes are usually resource constrained with respect to energy, memory, and computation and communication capabilities. It is not possible for each node to authenticate all incoming request messages, whether these request messages are from authorized or unauthorized nodes. Any malicious node can flood the network by sending messages repeatedly for creating denial of service attack, which will eventually bring down the whole network. In this paper, a lightweight authentication scheme named as Biphase Authentication Scheme (BAS) is presented for wireless sensor networks. This scheme provides initial small scale authentication for the request messages entering wireless sensor networks and resistance against denial of service attacks.