Dynamic Message Puzzle as Pre-Authentication Scheme in Wireless Sensor Networks

Denial of Service (DoS) is a type of attack that has a huge impact on a computer system. This can deplete and shorten the lifetime of wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Signature-based DoS is a kind of DoS attack that exploits the high computation of a public key cryptography based authentication. The adversaries have the opportunity to send a large number of a fake signature to the WSNs. Message Specific Puzzle (MSP) was developed to defend against this type of attack. This scheme utilizes a hash function as an irreversible method to create a puzzle and produce a session key. Furthermore, this has low complexity in the sender and receiver for construction and verification process. However, the sender-side delay occurred. The higher the security expected for the system leads to the more time is needed for the user to send messages. The number of hash iteration in the puzzle construction cannot be controlled. This paper proposes the Dynamic Message Puzzle scheme that uses the power of first quartile (Q1power1) and the exponential of second quartile (Q2exp) threshold functions. These limit the maximum number of hash iterations for each puzzle construction. Consequently, this mechanism can decrease sender-side delay by at least 60%. Besides avoiding zero solution and has a high value of mean absolute deviation, this scheme also increases the adversaries’ complexity in attacking the system. The proposed scheme transmits index implicitly. This obscures the portion of each parameter in the transmitted packet.